Member review

How to Train Your Dragon (2025) is a highly visually appealing film. Over the course of the film the videographers use special ways of filming flight (such as using drones) to make watching Hiccup and Toothless fly more enjoyable and fresh each time. The dragons look truly real, their motions look exactly how you would picture a dragon to move; and most of all the isle of Berk perfectly captures the feel of an ancient Viking Island. As a whole, this film is beautiful. In almost every single way, only one thing knocks this film down from five stars. And that is the music.

In the film, there were at most five different pieces of repetitive music. Whenever Hiccup flew on Toothless, it would always play the exact same bit of music, and the same with other events that repeated. They all had the same bit of music, it didn't really change. Therefore, the only part of this film that I didn't enjoy. Was it auditory design. It was written very well; interesting and engaging characters where presented, and the jokes that were there were funny (except for you Astrid you know what you did) and as I have already mentioned the look of the film as a whole was really well done.

Of course, the music alone wasn't the only thing that made this film not enjoyable for me, the fact that the dragons sounded like real world animals didn't help either. To explain, at times in the film the dragons would have something happen to them, for the sake of this review lets say they are getting pet; they would sound like a real world house cat during this. This was disconcerting only because it didn't feel any different to a cat, no changes in editing just like the animal it was inspired by. Most of the time this film handles the dragons auditory design well. But in a few cases it just felt off somehow. Of course this may just be me.

I would recommend this film to anyone and everyone who loves a good fantasy adventure. It's a wild goofy ride through what life would be like if dragons existed, and a great trip out; as the film isn't too long and is recently released at the time of writing so still on in the fancy seats.

Thanks for reading!