How To Train Your Dragon (2025) ★★★

Released: 9 June 2025

Director: Dean Deblois

Starring: Mason Thames, Gerard Butler

Based on Cressida Cowell’s book series, 2010’s How to Train Your Dragon became an instant classic and one of DreamWorks’ most cherished features. With two successful sequels and a slew of TV adventures, it was perhaps inevitable that the story would be retold in live-action. Now, director Dean DeBlois returns to helm a remake that stays close to the original while swapping animated charm for VFX spectacle.

Set in the Viking village of Berk, the film follows Hiccup (Mason Thames), a scrawny, inventive teenager and the disappointment of his father, chieftain Stoick the Vast (Gerard Butler returning to play his live-action counterpart). In a world where killing dragons is a rite of passage, Hiccup changes the course of his tribe’s future when he secretly befriends a dangerous and elusive Night Fury he names Toothless. As their bond grows, Hiccup realises that everything his people believe about dragons is wrong, and peace might be possible if he’s brave enough to lead the way.

How to Train Your Dragon at its heart, is about being at war with oneself. Hiccup wrestles with his father’s expectations, the Viking legacy, and his identity, which places him outside those ideals. The live-action format captures this arc dutifully, with Thames and Butler’s scenes among the strongest in conveying this tension to both comedic and emotive effect. 

As a viewer, the film also presents an internal conflict. There’s no denying that the VFX is stunning. The dragons look incredible, and there’s an added level of peril brought to the scenes in the battle training arena and during the fiery final act. As Hiccup and Toothless soar across sprawling cliffside landscapes accompanied by John Powell’s triumphant original score, it’s the closest the film comes to capturing the euphoric spirit of the animation. Toothless looks impressive, not as whimsically cute, but destined to sell a million plush toys. And therein lies the continual drag. This film wasn’t remade to say anything new or show anything different; it was made to keep the tills ringing. 

Disney has defined its current era with a conveyor belt of soulless live-action retellings of their beloved animated classics. For every Snow White box office bomb, there’s a Lilo & Stitch to keep the money train going. Universal gets in on this action, but How to Train Your Dragon goes for a shot-for-shot transition rather than an awkward retooling. Whether this is a wise choice is debatable. On one hand, it highlights the creative bankruptcy of what is ultimately a product extension rather than a film. On the other, the only thing more depressing than having a near-perfect film remade for no reason is having a great story butchered in the process. That said, the beat-for-beat recreation of standout lines and moments feels more hollow than nostalgic.

Hollywood’s continuation of live-action remakes raises the question of whether the originals are being quietly replaced in public consciousness, relegated to the affections of cinephiles and purists. Animation is an art form that achieves what live-action simply can’t replicate. It unlocks imagination in a way that transcends realism. In recreating the surface of How to Train Your Dragon, this version risks losing what made it fly in the first place. With enough remakes in existence to create a scale, How to Train Your Dragon is one of the more successful cash grabs. There’s heart in the performances, visual wonder in the set pieces, and enough sincerity in the storytelling to move younger audiences and fans of the original. For kids discovering this story for the first time, it will likely dazzle. For returning viewers, it offers familiarity wrapped in shiny new packaging. But even as it entertains, it’s hard to ignore the wider trend it feeds. Animation is not a stepping stone to something greater; it’s the medium where stories like this were always meant to thrive. While this remake doesn’t tarnish the legacy of How to Train Your Dragon, it reminds us that magic, once rendered in 2D or pixels, doesn’t always survive the journey to flesh and bone.