I know and fully accept that I am not the target audience for the How to Train Your Dragon movies. But, I did go see it with my daughter, who certainly is the target audience. She said she liked the movie – and wanted to watch the first two again when we got home – but her squirming in the theater seat and her consistent asking about when it was going to be over betrayed her post-movie excitement. And, she didn’t laugh even once. Neither did I. Maybe my daughter is an anomaly (or maybe I am), but I don’t understand why parents take their kids to movies like this. Sure, it might not be bottom of the barrel when it comes to films made largely for youngsters, but that doesn’t mean The Hidden World gets a pass for being nothing more than middle of the road. With all that we now know about child development, why are frenetic, loud, and visually over-stimulating movies still the standard fare for kids?
A few hours after I took my daughter to see The Hidden World, I hosted a film screening of Morgan Neville’s documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor? I had seen the film before, but after my experience with the morning’s feature, it was refreshing to see Fred Rogers slow things down for kids and operate with them on a healthy level. It was eye-opening, and it put into place and reinforced my issues with the film I’d seen earlier in the day. Would I have given much of a thought to the hyperactivity of such films had I not taken my daughter, or if I wasn’t a dad at all? Who knows. But I did, and I am, so here we are.
I don’t have much to say about the plot of The Hidden World. The insistence that it “finishes the trilogy” implies that the whole mythology was mapped out from the beginning when that is clearly no the case. New information is shoehorned in via flashback that should have been acted on two movies ago but wasn’t. In addition, no one learns anything of consequence and all the Vikings are Scottish for some reason (I won’t even go into the notion of capturing, domesticating, and forcing wild animals to fight on your behalf). The animation is pleasant enough to look at when it’s not flying at you above the speed limit, but that’s hardly enough to appease the negatives. My advice: Skip it. Take your kid to the park or the library instead.
James is a writer, skateboarder, record collector, wrestling nerd, and tabletop gamer living with his family in Asheville, North Carolina. He is a member of the Southeastern Film Critics Association, the North Carolina Film Critics Association, and contributes to The Daily Orca, Razorcake Magazine, Mountain Xpress, and Asheville Movies.