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‘How to Train Your Dragon 3’ Soars in Its Wordless Moments

‘The Hidden World’ is supposed to the third and final installment of the franchise.

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How to Train Your Dragon 3

‘How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World’ Soars in Its Wordless Moments

How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World is supposed to the third and final installment of the franchise, but going by past records of money-minting universes, it’s difficult to trust a studio. After all, Toy Story 4 is back in our lives despite an apparently final goodbye.

Based on Cressida Cowell’s works, Hiccup’s (Jay Baruchel) journey despite all the big bang of dragon wars and Viking bluster has been an evolution through loss. If the loss of a limb elevated the tale of friendship in the first film, the loss of a parent made coming-of-age heartbreakingly inevitable in the second one.

In the present and presumably last part, everything has been raised to feed the elegiac feeling of the tale. Not only Hiccup, his cat-like dragon pet Toothless will also come of age, as a buildup to the inevitable sendoff.
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In The Hidden World, the human-dragon utopia is in full swing with Berk and its tribesmen, but again there’s a new threat. This time, it is Grimmel who has hunted down every member of the alpha dragon breed called the Night Furies, and is now after Hiccup’s best friend.

Grimmel voiced by F. Murray Abraham operates as if Bela Lugosi went to watch Ratatouille’s Anton Ego. With his acid-spewing pets, he is such a fearsome dragon slayer that the folks of Berk have to find the mythical place at the end of the world in the hope that it could perhaps be a refuge for Berkians and the dragons alike.

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This Grimmel business despite all the brouhaha and action is actually a distraction from the real charm of the film. In The Hidden World, Toothless discovers that he is actually not the last of his tribe. There is a possible companion for him, delightfully pitched as an opposite here as Light Fury. Bathed in white glow, she invites Toothless’ shiny black body into a mating dance that is nothing short of a dazzling work of animated wonder.

That the dragons don’t have words at their disposal, and communicate through facial muscles makes some of the sequences speak volumes about the franchise’s innate potential.

Roger Deakins has been credited as a visual consultant, and the merger of his naturalistic lensing into a fantasyland makes the two dragons fly over land, water, and clouds to engage in a silent romance that make your eyes dazzle, and your heart cackle with its play of light, shadow and colours.

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By the time the busy animation settles into the climax, it’s evident that all this running around was lack of not only plotting, but also the characteristic banter that usually lights up most animation films these days. Series regular Dean DeBlois continues to make the action scenes noisy, and the humour continues to miss the punches. But one thing he gets right: the bond between Toothless and Hiccup, thus ascertaining that poignancy doesn’t need words. The film does fly with its wordless moments, and by the time the farewell arrives, you are comforted by the realization that not all is lost.

(The writer is a journalist, a screenwriter, and a content developer who believes in the insanity of words, in print or otherwise. He tweets @RanjibMazumder)

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