A lot of modern animated fantasy feels interchangeable: sweeping landscapes, mythical creatures, and a young hero discovering their destiny. It’s a formula that’s become so prominent over the past 15 years, it’s easy to forget there was a time when movies like this weren’t nearly as common, despite being one of the oldest storytelling frameworks in existence. Then came How to Train Your Dragon.
When How to Train Your Dragon hit theaters in 2010, it didn’t just tell a charming story about Vikings versus dragons. It quietly redefined what mainstream animated fantasy looked like. It’s less fairy tale and more folklore, less ironic and more sincere. Dreamworks Animation stopped chasing Pixar and embraced emotional stakes rather than relying on fart jokes with a big green ogre. With both How to Train Your Dragon and its sequel slated to leave Netflix at the end of the month, now’s the perfect time to revisit a movie that was, in so many ways, very ahead of its time — and one kickstarted a stream of Celtic- and Nordic-inspired movies like Brave and even Frozen.
The premise is simple: Hiccup (Jay Baruchel) is a scrawny Viking teenager in a culture obsessed with killing dragons, and he’s desperate to prove himself to his gregarious father, Stoick (Gerard Butler). When Hiccup miraculously succeeds in downing one of the scariest and rarest dragons in existence, a Night Fury, he doesn’t see a fearsome monster. Instead, he sees a curious and intelligent creature, so he winds up befriending it instead.
He names the dragon Toothless, on account of its retractable teeth, and this mythical creature becomes the heart of the entire franchise. So many prominent examples of great animation live or die based on the expressiveness of their wordless characters — how much can be conveyed through the eyes, gestures, and body language? The way Toothless’ ears curl back almost like a cat and how he eagerly fetches objects paint him as more of a friendly pet than a dangerous beast.
What’s striking, even today, is how patient the evolving relationship is between Hiccup and Toothless. Directors Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders let entire sequences play out with minimal dialogue, relying on body language, hesitation, and small acts of trust.
Consider that up until that point, DreamWorks’ tentpole franchise was Shrek, which relied on cheeky, mature humor and star-studded casts. Kids could watch it, but some of the jokes and implications would fly over their heads. (Try to make sense of a donkey mating with a dragon, for instance.) Kids could delight in the low-stakes adventures and laugh whenever Donkey did something weird, but you would never accuse Shrek of being thematically rich. How to Train Your Dragon took a different approach that borders on the mythic, leveraging a Northern European fantasy aesthetic grounded in folklore. To be clear, How to Train Your Dragon didn’t invent this particular style — you could argue that it’s ancient — but it definitely proved there was a massive audience for it today.
More importantly, How to Train Your Dragon also proved younger audiences could handle emotionally grounded stories with dramatic stakes. Hiccup loses his leg! In the face of that adversity, he devises a custom prosthetic that integrates with a dragon harness of his own design. The story puts a lot of trust in even its youngest of viewers to grapple with more complex themes: the weight of expectation, conflict between family members, and forging your own destiny.
Hiccup’s journey isn’t about becoming the warrior his father expects him to be, but about revolutionizing his culture’s entire perspective on the world they live in. The sequel bravely explores a timeskip rather than pick things up right after the first, pushing its cast of children into adulthood. Where many animated sequels might feel like a do-over, How to Train Your Dragon 2 ups the stakes and progresses the narrative forward. Characters grow older, they mature, and they carry emotional scars.
How to Train Your Dragon notably wasn’t the only movie to popularize this type of fantasy story. Production on Pixar’s 2012 movie Brave, an original story, began in 2008 (two years before How to Train Your Dragon‘s debut). Both stories explore a northern European culture rooted in fear of monsters; for one, that’s dragons, for the other, that’s bears. Both heroes clash with their same-gender parent due to societal expectations. And for both, not only do they emerge changed, but their entire society is changed as well.
That mythic, folkloric formula feels pretty prominent today, and we probably have How to Train Your Dragon to thank for it. Before both the original and its more mature sequel leave Netflix, they’re worth revisiting not just because they’re great movies, but because they remain hugely influential for animation at large. A lot of films have chased that sense of scale, depth, emotional weight, and sincerity.
More than 15 years later, most of them are still trying to catch up.
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