Рецензия на HTTYD2 на HitFix

[sherlocup2011]

С этими ранними рецензиями всегда подозрения мучают, но ё-моё, как же приятно читать!

CANNES -- Before the screening of "How To Train Your Dragon 2" started, there was a special trailer that was put together just for this event, celebrating 20 years of DreamWorks Animation bringing movies to Cannes to premiere.

What I found most impressive about it is how they managed to make even the films I really enjoyed from their studio look terrible by emphasizing the loud, the coarse, the most obvious of the jokes. It played more like a threat than a celebration, and it makes me wonder… is this what DreamWorks thinks works best with their films? Is this what they want every one of their movies to look like?

If so, the "How To Train Your Dragon" series must drive them crazy.

под катом продолжение, вернее, та его часть, что без спойлеров

With this second film in the series, Dean DeBlois (who both wrote and directed the movie) has turned this into the most exciting overall property that DreamWorks has, live-action or animated. The film has an immediate confidence, and they don't spend much time trying to explain the first film. This is a sequel that has its own story to tell and that gets right down to it, and it expands on the ideas from the first film, but in a way that tells a thematically satisfying and complete story. In other words, this is how franchises are supposed to work.

The film's opening will most likely give J.K. Rowling a serious case of the sweats as we see the dragonriders of Berk playing a newly-invented sport that involves sheep, baskets, and airborne acrobatics that are truly dizzying. Only in animation could you ever really pull off a scene like that, and that's true of so much of this film, which is one of the reasons I really love these movies. If you're going to do an animated film, then do something that you can't duplicate in live-action. Take me someplace that could never exist. Put your camera someplace you could never shoot. Let your characters do things that no actor could physically duplicate. "How To Train Your Dragon 2" makes impressive use of the freedom of animation, both in terms of action and design.

Another virtue of these films is that they're not afraid of quiet moments. When we finally catch up with Hiccup (Jay Baruchel) and Toothless, they are enjoying a private flight together. You've seen bits of it in the trailers, but the scene as a whole is such a beautiful expression of the feeling of flight and the joy of being able to do this amazing thing. Their friendship has transformed their entire community, and it's become an example for everyone in Berk, including Stoick The Vast (Gerard Butler), Hiccup's father.

In the "Kung-Fu Panda" series, DreamWorks took advantage of what seemed like an innocuous joke in the first film about a goose being the father of a panda to create a second film that dug deep into the feelings that come with being an adopted child or an adoptive parent, and I thought it was a really smart and beautiful way to deal with those ideas. Parenthood is a major theme in this second "Dragon" film as well, but in a different way. The questions of where our personalities come from and how we are the sum of two other people are raised here, and it's genuinely emotional to watch not only Hiccup's journey in this film, but the emotional arc for both his father and Valka (Cate Blanchett), his long-lost-and-presumed-dead mother.



Дальше я читать не стала, поскольку там слишком много о сюжете, но если кому хочется, то здесь продолжение.

И ещё капс из комментов.

Меня это одновременно радует и пугает. И рейтинг "0+" удивляет всё сильнее.

@темы: HTTYD