HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON (2025)

How to Train Your Dragon (2025)

Live-action remake

Directed by Dean DeBlois

Universal Pictures / DreamWorks Animation

During the VIEW Conference, we had the chance to watch the excellent live-action film How to Train Your Dragon (2025 version). The VIEW Conference is an internationally renowned computer graphics convention, founded in 2000. It takes place every year in Turin, Italy between October and November. The topics covered include interactive techniques, digital cinema, 3D animation, gaming, and VFX (Visual Effects – the visual effects used to create or modify imagery in a live-action film, that is, one performed by real actors). The event unfolds over several days and includes public sessions, workshops, and seminars. The conference hosts various international speakers from across the computer graphics industry, who present their work to attendees, alongside Masterclasses and theoretical lectures delivered by experts.

At the Cinema Massimo – National Cinema Museum in Turin, How to Train Your Dragon (2025) visual effects supervisor Christian Mänz and animation supervisor Glen McIntosh took to the stage to give a live introduction to the film.

With the live-action remake of How to Train Your Dragon, director Dean DeBlois both closes a circle and opens a new one. Having directed the original animated trilogy, which began in 2010, he returned behind the camera and rewrote the screenplay together with William Davies and Chris Sanders, the writers of the animated films, to reinterpret his own work using completely different tools: real actors, physical landscapes, and extensive use of next-generation CGI (Computer Generated Imagery). The result is a film of great visual ambition, which remains poetically faithful to its original themes. It is not just a children’s film, it captivates and entertains adult audiences as well.

The two VFX supervisors confirmed that they are already working on the second chapter of the live-action saga, scheduled for release in 2026. They explained that the first film took three years of their lives, but with extremely rewarding results. They coordinated a vast team of 1,300 people who worked closely alongside the actors. Both are particularly proud of the relationship created between the main character, the boy Hiccup, and the young Black Fury dragon, Toothless. To achieve that level of realism, delicacy and emotional effectiveness, they employed a puppeteer and then translated those movements digitally. The result is that audiences will see the dragon behave with the realism of a household pet, prompting reactions such as “my dog does that too!” The empathy and bond achieved between the human and the CGI dragon are truly astonishing.

The new film offers a more grounded, visceral, and “earthly” version of the legend of the boy Hiccup and his dragon Toothless. The story remains faithful to its origins: in a Viking village that has been fighting dragons for centuries, young Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III (played by Mason Thames) lives in the shadow of his father Stoick (Gerard Butler, the only cast member from the original films to reprise his role, having voiced the character fifteen years ago in the animated trilogy). When he injures a Black Fury, a species of dragon capable of camouflaging itself at night and becoming nearly invisible in the dark sky, he decides not to kill it: a gesture that will forever change the fate of both worlds. The theme of the neglected son and the father unable to understand his child’s difference remains the emotional core of the story, here portrayed with greater intimacy. The new How to Train Your Dragon (2025) thus becomes a parable about the courage to change tradition, the power of kindness and empathy, and the possibility of building bridges between seemingly irreconcilable worlds.

One of the most striking aspects of this remake is its extraordinary visual attention. Shot largely in Iceland, the film uses real landscapes as its foundation but amplifies them digitally through a process of “enhancement” of natural features. The real Iceland, already rugged and primordial, has been digitally “augmented”: steeper coasts, more vertiginous cliffs, darker Arctic skies heavy with clouds, Viking villages carved into basalt. Visual effects play a key role in this aesthetic construction. The result is a landscape larger than life, a kind of mythological Iceland: tangible yet transfigured, ancient and legendary.

Bill Pope’s cinematography enhances this vision with strong contrasts and grazing natural light: the film appears bathed in a perpetual Nordic twilight, evoking both the harshness and the poetry of a world poised between civilisation and wild nature.

On the technical front, DeBlois and DreamWorks combine cinematic and digital expertise. The dragon sequences merge motion capture with puppeteering, recreating the natural expressiveness seen in the animated films, but with a realistic touch. For some scenes, the animators, a squadron of 1,300 professionals working over two years, built physical 3D maquettes, later digitised and integrated into the live-action context.

Toothless, created entirely in CGI, retains his playful and affectionate nature: his behaviour perfectly blends animal and humanoid traits, with animation work that makes every glance, movement, and gesture of affection utterly believable. He is the visual embodiment of mutual trust, rendered with both sensitivity and technical precision.

The film relies on a balanced and engaging cast, mostly British:

American actor Mason Thames is very young; he plays the protagonist Hiccup, a boy of fragile yet determined energy. Hiccup struggles to find his place, disappoints his elders, doesn’t fit into his community, and is haunted by a sense of inadequacy, yet he possesses deep sensitivity and a powerful intellectual curiosity, which, after many trials, ultimately lead him to triumph.

Young British actress Nico Parker plays Astrid, a girl with a charismatic and captivating presence; her courage and bold self-confidence serve as a counterbalance to Hiccup’s introspection. She is the most capable among the trainees: skilled, determined, and highly motivated. She serves both as a role model and a challenge for Hiccup – strong, skilled in combat, attractive, but also endowed with moral integrity, making her an important ally.

English actor Harry Trevaldwyn, with his long face and naturally orange hair styled into two Viking braids, plays Tuffnut; his twin sister, played by English actress Bronwyn James (Ruffnut), shares the same hair colour. The duo provides a touch of chaos and serves as comic relief during the more dramatic sequences.

As mentioned, Gerard Butler (Stoick) portrays the imposing father and chief of the Viking village of Berk. He brings depth and authority to the role – a father torn between pride and love. The Scottish actor, originally from a suburb of Glasgow, had previously voiced Stoick in the original animated How to Train Your Dragon trilogy.

English actor Nick Frost, known for many acclaimed films, plays Gobber, the chief’s assistant, responsible for training young recruits in combat. He brings the necessary humour to balance the story’s dramatic tension.

Each character retains the essence established in the animated trilogy but gains new life through live-action performance: faces, gestures, and emotional nuance make the community of Berk a touching human microcosm that audiences can truly connect with.

John Powell once again composes the score, reinterpreting the original themes with a broader orchestral approach, blending traditional Nordic instruments (horns, bodhrán, Icelandic flutes) with epic yet melancholy tones. The music serves as a powerful emotional glue: the soaring flight sequences and battle scenes are underscored by an epic, though conventional, soundtrack.

As already announced by Universal Pictures and DreamWorks, Dean DeBlois is developing the sequel, scheduled for 2026, which will adapt the second chapter of the saga into live action. The goal is to expand the legendary and dramatic tone while maintaining the balance between visual spectacle and intimate family introspection.

The 2025 remake, in fact, is not a mere stylistic exercise, but the first step in a new live-action trilogy designed to dialogue with the animated one, a richly crafted reinvention that respects the emotional core of the story: the bond between the boy and the creature who teaches him to see the world with new eyes. It achieves this through a more grounded and mature cinematic language.

Digitally “enhanced” Iceland, sculpted into myth, is mesmerising: a real world magnified by imagination.

A beautiful, entertaining and moving film, recommended even for adult audiences.

Hiccup (Mason Thames) and Astrid (Nico Paker)