The beloved How to Train Your Dragon animated film is getting a live-action adaptation, and, on top of perfectly translating its iconic dragons to real life, the new version of the story will be giving Astrid more to do.
The original film was released in 2010, and it's honestly surprising that it took fifteen years to bring it into live-action—but, regardless, audiences are excited for it to finally be here.
How to Train Your Dragon star Gerard Butler, who is reprising his role of Stoick the Vast, previously teased to the Direct that this new adaptation "feels much more involved and just immersive," even adding that it's "a lot more scary."
Universal Pictures invited The Direct out to an event in Los Angeles where the film's director, Dean DeBlois, showed off some exclusive clips from the movie and shared some new tidbits about how they pulled it all off.
How to Train Your Dragon Director on Astrid's New Storyline in the Movie
"She Has a Greater Depth and a Great Transition, Greater Arc Throughout the Story."
In describing the cast of How to Train Your Dragon, director Dean DeBlois shared some interesting information about Nico Parker's Astrid, who is Hiccup's love interest in the original and the first (besides Hiccup) to learn about Toothless.
DeBlois shared that her role in the movie will be expanded, giving her more to do, and providing a bigger emotional payoff:
Dean DeBlois: Nico Parker plays Astrid that kind of, you know, feeds into this idea that she has come from a different culture, that she is a descendant of one of those prized dragon-fighting warriors that were collected by Vikings in different places.
And she now has [becoming] chief in mind. She hopes to be chief of this tribe one day, she's got great ambition, and what's nice about it is that it creates a conflict between she and Hiccup. He's kind of a kid of privilege, being the son of the chief, but it also gives her something that she really has to sacrifice in the end, when she decides to stand by Hiccup and convert to this new way of thinking.
So, not only is she kick ass in several scenes, she has a greater depth and a greater transition, greater arc throughout the story.
How the Team Crafted Live-Action Dragons for the New Film Adaptation
"We Wanted to Make Sure We Didn't Sacrifice Those Trademark Silhouettes and Personalities..."
Unsurprisingly, the dragons in How to Train Your Dragon are easily the most iconic part of the series.
Bringing them from animation to live-action wasn't going to be easy, but director Dean DeBlois revealed some key tips they were given to really knock it out of the park:
Dean DeBlois: In designing them for live-action, we wanted to make sure we didn't sacrifice those trademark silhouettes and personalities and everything from the animated movie that we wanted to draw forward. So obviously, we wanted to set aside anything that was too anthropomorphic because we're really trying to build the idea of credible dragons on the screen, but finding how much to retain versus how much to reinvent was a bit of an evolving process.
And, at one point, we were talking to a visual effects legend, John Dykstra. He was one of the founding members of ILM, and he had this great little Kernel of Wisdom that we kind of took on and have kept to this day, which is, imagine the animated movie came after the live-action movie. So everything that, in terms of Dragon design that you've simplified and caricatured and highlighted, came from the actual animal that was filmed with with real cameras and moved around as a creature of this natural world.
So, kind of working backward, we're able to sort of retain what we think might have been simplified in an animated design but give it a little bit more of a robust sort of skeleton and musculature and scales and details, but from afar, still feel like that's the same creature.
And then the challenge has been upon our animators to do exactly what our Dreamworks animators had to do, which is watch a whole lot of dog and cat and horse videos and find those cues that we humans interpret as being the attitudes that we want to be expressed so that we don't sacrifice personality.
And hopefully, we've managed to do that. But with every dragon, there is sort of a sense of reinvention because some of them were cartoonier than others. And so how do you keep the spirit, you know, those those few attributes that could be translated over to a creature that could actually walk around with dinosaurs in Jurassic Park and feel like they fit in?
The director went on to praise the team they had who worked and created the physical puppets the everyone on set was able to work with instead of always acting across from nothing.
DeBlois: Because they weren't present with us on stage, we had these amazing puppeteers who, there's a company called Sitches and Glue, they created foam heads and bodies from the digital assets of the dragons, and then they puppeteered them in such a way that they disappeared and there was a dragon, no matter how sparse it was, but our actors had somebody to act with. It wasn't just blocking and choreography, it was performance.
So, Tom Wilton and his amazing team, these are the people that did like 'War Horse,' and they puppeteered the Tiger in the [live stage] version of ['Life of Pi']. It's just incredible. I like to see these people disappear into their puppetry. It's so inspiring to us on stage, to the actors, but also to the animators, who would then jump into those shots. So we had that.
And then added to that, this amazing technology of having an eight-axis gimbal that's about half the size of the screen, and on top of that, an animatronic puppet of each and every dragon in the movie, sort of a bust where you have the chest, the neck, and the head. And as our actors would be strapped onto it in their saddles, they would be moved by every every movement.
So, you'd have the wing, shoulders, you'd have the head, and as a result, the neck moving around. So Hiccup, rather than just riding a dragon, he is like a jockey on a horse. He moves around with it. And we try to do that with all of the young dragon riders in this movie.
The New Trailer for How to Train Your Dragon Is Here
Universal has officially released the new trailer for How to Train Your Dragon, which reveals tons of new glimpses into the live-action adaptation of the original animated movie.
One of the biggest elements of the film is how it finally reveals what dragon riding will look like onscreen.
The new footage also gives more insight into Astrid and Hiccup's dynamic and relationship on screen, and brief looks of their crew training to kill dragons.
Many fans will probably get most excited to finally see the Red Death, who gets to shine in the climactic closing moments of the trailer.
The full teaser can be seen here:
Universal's How to Train Your Dragon hits theaters on June 13.
