Consider the Source: How To Train Your Dragon

DreamWorks’ How To Train Your Dragon is the kind of adaptation that seems to take place in an alternate dimension from the original book. Like the novel, the film takes place on an Viking island called Berk, most of the characters have the same names and dragons are all over the place. Apart from that, the film, while highly entertaining, has practically nothing common with Cressida Cowell’s original YA book.

Subtitled, “Heroic Misadventures of Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III” and allegedly “translated from the Old Norse” by Cressida Cowell, How To Train Your Dragon depicts the coming of age of Hiccup, the scrawny, 11-year old son of a Viking chief. Where in the film, dragons are hostile but misunderstood marauders, the book depicts dragons as being half-domesticated, comparable to hunting dogs or trained falcons. The book begins with Hiccup, by virtue of being the chief’s son, leading his peers on a raid of a dragon’s nest to capture young dragons. Hiccup ends up with a undersized reptile that rembles a “Common or Garden Dragon,” but which he claims is an undiscovered breed, the “Toothless Daydream.” When Hiccup’s attempts to make “Toothless” behave fail, he consults a would-be scholarly Viking text, How To Train Your Dragon, but is dismayed to fine that it consists of one line: “YELL AT IT; THE LOUDER, THE BETTER.”