Monday, April 12, 2010

How to train your dragon

Screw "Clash of the titans"! The Kraken took 20 minutes to rise from the sea and took less than minute for Perseus to finish it off. Hades lasted even shorter. If you want a good Greek mythology with action, you'll be better off playing "God of War 3" on PS3. But if you want to enjoy a good movie this summer, go watch "How to train your dragon". This is just one of the animations that made you wonder if actors would be obsolete in the near future.




(the starting soundtrack - 'this is berk')

From the beginning, the music would have captivated you, a hallmark of a very good movie. The movie soundtrack is AWESOME, and I would highly recommend buying it.

The storytelling was also excellent and the script was very well written. There was no moment of lapse.

The animation was very detailed and unlike some of the animations, the fast-moving scenes are well rendered. The emotions of the character were well animated and these was very well complemented by the excellent voice acting.

The casts include voices by Christopher Mintz-Plasse (who also acted as Red Mist in Kick Ass, another highly recommended movie by me!), America Ferrera (Ugly Betty), Gerald Butler (300, Law Abiding Citizen, Gamer, Bounty Hunter) and my favourite Craig Ferguson (from the Late Late Show). But perhaps, the best voice acting goes to the main character in the movie, Jay Baruchel as Hiccup.

Lines like, "You are not my son!" and "I'm proud of you my son!" may sounds too cliche in animations. But with a good build-up of story, good voice acting coupled with good animation, the lines popped up at exactly where they are suppose to be, triggering the emotions of the audience.

Despite the typical brain vs brawn theme (i.e. brain saves the world and gets the girl), this movie turned out to be a lot of fun. It is definitely worth a watch. It is indeed very rare that animations are able to capture human emotions as well as "How to train your dragon". The other animated motion picture that came close was, to my opinion, "Finding Nemo".

At the rate computer graphics and animations are improving, I can see that somewhere in our future, our grandchildren would be saying, "Haha, my grandpa used to watch movies acted by real person! What a joke!?"

1 comment:

Jee Hor said...

Yea, I watched 'How to train a dragon?' in 3D. It was absolutely worth the money! :)