How to Train Your Dragon 2 (spoiler free)

Saturday's movie was How to Train Your Dragon 2, unsurprisingly a sequel to 2010's rather excellent How to Train Your Dragon. I will note that I do plan to see it again to pick up on bits that I may have missed while chasing a small child around the cinema and trying to keep her from eating floor food.

HtTYD2 does a number of pretty brave things. Firstly, it advances the storyline of the franchise by five years (some of which is filled in by the surprisingly good Dreamworks' Dragons TV series), and allows the characters and their relationships to grow because of that fact. Secondly, it turns a number of characters against obvious type, especially Stoick the Vast, who has evolved from a slightly one note character in the first film to a deeply layered individual (as fathers do when their sons get old enough to really know them). Thirdly, it is even more willing than the first film to draw blood.

HtTYD2 is a more mature film than HtTYD, in just about every way, and that is not intended as a criticism of the first film. Dragon was the child, and Dragon 2 is what it's grown into, encouraging its audience to take a chance and grow with it. The writer/director Dead DeBlois has likened it to The Empire Strikes Back as a growth and maturation of the franchise, and it's not an unfair nor especially boastful comparison (although I hope this doesn't mean we'll get Ewoks in part 3 and a series of disappointing prequels); Hiccup even has a low-tech lightsabre. The central characters are beautifully realised, and the relationship between Hiccup and Astrid in particular is wonderfully real and rounded, with the animation and voice acting both depicting an impressive chemistry for a cartoon.

Speaking of the animation, now that I've started, the film is absolutely gorgeous. I saw it in Ipswich, and while I can take or leave 3D I do regret not getting to see the film on IMAX, because the world of Dragon is so sumptuously rendered and so full of the kind of sweeping vistas that IMAX is truly good for. The dragons remain impressive in their motion and expressions, as well as their overall design. The human characters avoid the uncanny valley through their stylised, exaggerated appearance, without looking silly or ever causing us to doubt their reality.

I caught this one early, so by request I'm not going to do a spoiler-review part; I might do one later on.