I haven’t yet seen How to Train Your Dragon 2. Like you, I’ve heard some mighty interesting things about it—both good and bad—and, like you, I’ll be reading Adam Holz’s review when it’s published later today.
I’m hoping he’ll have a whole lot more good than bad to say.
See, I pretty much loved the original How to Train Your Dragon. The movie was near brilliant, lauding unexpected friendships, bravery and the sometimes prickly beauty of family. The storytelling was a multilayered cake of awesomeness, playing simultaneously to kids and teens and adults. The animation was colorful and lush. It was super-clean, earning a pretty rare 4.5 stars from us. And it was super-fun, too. Will wonders never cease?
It was so good that, when I walked out of the movie back in 2010, the first thought in my head was, “Wow. That was almost as good as a Pixar movie.”
And that, my friends, tells you something about the state of animation today: That one of my favorite films of the year almost measured up to the regular output of a single animation studio.
And the state of animation has only improved since the first Dragon picture. There are more excellent storytellers in the field now, all telling deeply moving stories. And while some scholars point to Disney’s classic films of the late 1930s and early ’40s (think Snow White, Pinocchio and Bambi) as animation’s Golden Age, I don’t think animated movies as a whole have ever been better than they are right now.
Granted, not everything’s a classic. For every Dragon there’s a Nut Job. But consider just some of the animated films that have come down the pike just since 2010:
DreamWorks has given us the original Dragon as well as one of my favorite films from last year, The Croods. Illumination Entertainment released its two wildly popular Despicable Me movies. Disney, animation’s great-granddaddy, rediscovered its magic with movies like Tangled, Wreck-It Ralph and, of course, Frozen.
Pixar—the Disney-adjunct that I think really started this new Golden Age—is practically slumping by comparison … if you consider movies like Toy Story 3, Brave and Monsters University a slump. I don’t think Pixar’s storytelling has gotten worse, really. It’s just that everyone else has caught up.
It’s not just that these movies are relatively clean, which makes it so much easier for us here at Plugged In to give ’em their due. But when I look at the state of moviemaking today, it seems to me that many of the best told, most moving stories out there are in the realm of animation. Hey, I appreciated the craftsmanship of Oscar’s Best Picture winner 12 Years a Slave and was deeply impressed by Gravity. But neither made me tear up like Frozen or The Croods. These “kids” movies hit me—a wizened and cranky 45-year-old—right in the heart.
Do you agree with me? Are we in a new Golden Age of animation? And will How to Train Your Dragon 2 become a classic?
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