November 8th, 2019 
W.R. Miller 
This is a case of real life imitating art. Just as Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the Third, the young Viking chief of Berk, has to part company with his best bud, Toothless the dragon, so does writer/director Dean DeBlois say goodbye to How to Train Your Dragon. On November 7th, DeBlois reflected upon his involvement with a franchise that has spawned three movies, a 118-episode TV show, a Netflix preschool streaming series, four short films, an ice show, an arena show, three theme park attractions, 10 videogames and a TV special. So far.
Bob Miller: When you started on How to Train Your Dragon, did you have a trilogy in mind or was it a standalone at that point?
Dean DeBlois: It was a standalone simply because when Chris Sanders and I joined the production, they were already two years into its development. They had been trying to do a very faithful adaptation of Cressida Cowell’s first book. The problem was that Jeffrey [Katzenberg] ultimately decided the story was too young and too small for a major DreamWorks release. And when he called Chris and Chris consequently called me, we sat down with Jeffrey and said, “Look, we want a big father and son story with a David and Goliath ending and a Harry Potter tone. It has to speak to a more mature and broader audience.”
He said, “So it’ll be called How to Train Your Dragon and it will feature characters named Hiccup and Toothless and Stoick, per the books. Aside from that, re-invent.” And that’s when Chris and I took a look at the story. We thought, “Well, the Vikings have a symbiotic relationship with the dragons in the story. At the very end, a hostile dragon comes to their shores and Hiccup and his little Chihuahua-size, talking dragon, Toothless, take on the threat.” And we looked at it and thought, “Well, if they’re looking for bigger fantasy adventure tropes, what if we were to tell a story of the first Viking who took a chance and befriended an enemy and eventually brought to an end an age-old war between Vikings and dragons?”
For that purpose, we realized that Toothless needed to be reinvented. He needed to be something that was menacing and rooted in the folklore of the Vikings. Something that had never really been seen but its effects had been felt. And that could be terrifying, but also friendly and pet-like. And so we created this dragon that was based on a panther meets a salamander—large enough that Hiccup could crawl onto his back and fly it because it was injured, but not so big that it would dwarf him in every situation.
Chris and I were only trying to deliver a movie that worked within a very constrained time period. It was 16 months to the release of the movie and it needed a Page One reconceive. So it was a rush to the finish without any regard for what future sequels might be. But when it was finishing up and the reception was great and it was a box office success for the studio, I was asked to come up with ideas for sequels. Sequels aren’t generally my thing. I tend to avoid them if they feel unnecessary, if they lack a purpose.
So I pitched back the idea that we should do a three-act coming-of-age in three different installments. We could skip time and meet Hiccup at different crossroads in his life, but they would all be unified in this one journey of kind of a misfit ne’er-do-well who eventually becomes the wise, selfless Viking chief. And in the process, he has to say goodbye to the dragons. That, as an architecture, was bought off on. So I could continue to advance Hiccup’s story and the development of the characters with a sense of an end goal in mind.
BM: Dragons also had a TV series. One with Cartoon Network [Dragons: Riders of Berk; Dragons: Defenders of Berk] which then went to Netflix [Dragons: Race to the Edge]. Did you have any collaboration with them or did they have to follow your guidelines as to the fate of the characters?
DB: Well, I got together with Art [Elder Brown] and Doug [Sloan], the showrunners of the TV show periodically, and we would have dinner. We would talk about what they were tackling in terms of story material and what I was tackling, just to make sure we weren’t stepping on one another’s toes. But they did work within the constraint of the years that passed between movie one and two, and then between two and three. So it was all meant to have a certain consistency, both in characters but also the events of the world. Sharing outlines and just keeping in touch meant that we could be truthful to that and make sure that even though there are characters that appear in the TV series that are never mentioned in the movie series, there is a sense of unity to the whole thing.
BM: Now it’s been 10 years in your involvement [in the Dragon movies], right?
DB: Yes.
BM: Technology has advanced a long way. So did you do things in Hidden World that you couldn’t have done 10 years ago when you directed the first Dragon movie?
DB: Absolutely. Coming into it in 2008, I was blown away by what we could do in CGI animation because I had only ever worked in hand-drawn. The limitations of hand-drawn animation were our [pencil] line mileage against the production schedule. It’s just how much time an artist sits at their desk drawing details adds up. And so oftentimes, you’ll have to subtract details to make quota to get the movie done. In CGI, the biggest limitation was sets. You have to use the same sets repeatedly or be really crafty with how you create your settings because everything had to be built in three dimensions and had to be not only modeled, but lit—then in some cases, rigged for movement.
But the characters themselves can have immense detail. That was so exciting to me, just the subtlety of camera movement and how much rich detail you could have on your characters. Also the subtlety of acting, of expression. Whereas lines would boil in the hand-drawn animation version of a face pondering a dilemma, you could get very subtle shifts in expression with CGI.
So I was very excited by it. I thought we were working with the cutting edge of technology. But now, looking back on the first movie, it looks a little dated because it was limited in terms of the developments that followed. So every year—not even every movie—we would be gifted new tools and new sims that would actually automate certain movements. Or at least get them close to what the animator wanted. So things like fat jiggle or sort of sagging skin for a dragon’s wing membranes. For something like that, where it had to be animated by hand, an animator had to take shortcuts just to get the shots done in time. Now we could have lush detail. We could have very realistic hair sort of blowing in the breeze against the backdrop of leaves that are rustling in the same breeze.
All of this was starting to come alive in such a palpable way. But I think the biggest advancement on the second movie was the reinvention of the animation tools themselves. They went from being a cerebral-like numeric entry on everything. If you wanted to arch an eyebrow, you had to input the degree of the arch that you wanted and wait for it to render. Whereas now the tools had been reinvented so that an animator could work with a stylus and a tablet and manipulate the character as though it was a stop-motion puppet and grab and pull things and create key frames and do it with all of the detail of the character on it. And you might have multiple characters on your screen and it wouldn’t crash the system for the first time. So that was really exciting. But we were still limited by the backend.
Our ability to render those images took forever and required more computers than we could ever get our hands on. It was a bottleneck in the process. And so oftentimes we had to pull back on our ambition for what we wanted to deliver to the screen and find shortcuts, like matte paintings or reducing crowds or reinventing a shot, so that we could get around our problem.
With the third movie, they restructured the backend and they brought in a ray tracer, which completely changed because we had been doing global illumination rendering, which is much more time-consuming and it never quite looks believable. Ray tracing calculates light as it happens in the real world and it’s very fast.
With the cloud computing and the ray tracer (which is called MoonRay here at DreamWorks), that bottleneck was blown up and suddenly we could actually deliver on the images that we had dreamed up. So something like the Hidden World itself—with all of its light sources and all of its details and textures, from crystal to fungi to coral, the vast spaces populated by thousands of dragons—was finally possible. Which is great, because in terms of the evolution of the story, the third movie delivers the greatest numbers of characters and really needed to create a world that the audience would feel good about dragons disappearing into.
BM: Well there’s another factor, and that is the use of pans. On Madagascar 2, the directors said it took forever to render a pan movement. Now I look at Hidden World. In the beginning where the Dragon Riders raid the ship, you have this very complex camera shot following the battle, going up and down and around, following the characters. That’s amazing.
DB: Yeah, we decided to take that on as a challenge. We regretted it a few times because those shots got so out of hand and required so many animators on them. But it was nice to be able to do it. We did it three times in the movie where we had these compound shots that were inspired by some of Emmanuel Lubezki’s work in The Revenant. Choreographed action scenes would hand off from one character to another in these long takes. It was fun to do, but I don’t think anyone’s rushing back in to do it again because it was such a nightmare of logistics and coordination.
BM: But you wouldn’t have been able to do that in the previous film, right?
DB: I don’t think so. No. I don’t know the technical limitations of a shot like that, but yeah, everything was made possible just by the speed of the processing at the end of the movie. It allowed for shots like that to exist.
BM: So have we gotten to a point now where you can practically do anything in CG?
DB: Yes. I think so. I think we’ve actually reached a point where if you can dream it up and no matter how imaginative the image, if you can communicate that to a crew of artists, you can create it. And I don’t think it has to blow a budget or seem inconceivably long. The opportunity to reach for the sky is there now.
BM: That’s great. Now, something else I noticed, you did this prolonged pantomime scene between the Light Fury and Toothless…
DB: Yes.
BM: …where they’re doing the courtship. They communicated without human speech. Just grunts and groans. Randy Thom [supervising sound designer] did that, right?
DB: Yeah. Randy Thom. I put the challenge to Randy to actually create dragon conversation. I would, in the screenplay, indicate what I wanted in terms of English translation between dragons and he would take that and create sounds that kind of mimicked that cadence or mimicked that kind of emphasis or intent. And he did that several times through the movie. But I think that sequence, it just represents for me what I’ve come to learn about the power of animation. When you have masterful animators and you have a masterful composer, if you create moments that suspend dialogue, they become these transcendent icons of what the movie is. Like in the first film, the most talked about, standout sequence is the one in which Hiccup and Toothless do a little bit of a dance on the sand in the cove. And it leads to that first contact. We call it forbidden friendship.
In this movie, I wanted to do a bookend to that. But this time it’s between dragons. It’s also on an isolated beach. It also involves drawing in the sand, but now with Hiccup as a spectator and just leaving it to the power of the music and the power of the pantomime animation, it becomes a sequence that stands out just like the others. So I know now to carve out moments in the screenplay where characters just stop talking.
BM: I would imagine that helps in your international releases?
DB: Yes. And it becomes a sequence that resonates with all ages. You could play that for a group of bitter critics or a group of five-year-olds and it seems to elicit laughter and charm in the same way.
So that’s really nice about animation as well, the way it’s not just crosses boundaries in terms of cultures and countries, but it also crosses the boundaries of age.
BM: Recently, there’s been an emphasis on movies appealing to the global market as opposed to the North American market. That wasn’t the case with the first Dragon movie. You were primarily focused on North American culture, right? And then it changed?
DB: Yeah. It’s not even that we focused on it. It just seemed to be that was the greater response, the domestic box office. And I think the international box office has been catching up and surpassing with Dragon 2 and 3.
BM: Did that affect your storytelling when that happened?
DB: Not really, no. I think we adhered to the same sensibilities. Ultimately, I think it’s foolish to second-guess any audience that isn’t yourself. So I certainly don’t think about foreign audiences and what we should deliver to them. I wouldn’t dare to second guess what they’re interested in. But we, ourselves, the team that make the movie, we try to make a movie we would want to see and hope that others feel the same way.
BM: Sure, sure. Well, I’m also thinking of trimming Hiccup’s beard for China.
DB: Oh, yeah, that was a marketing decision. Apparently beards don’t go over well in China. (laughs)
BM: So was it just the trailer or was he beardless for the film in China?
DB: No, it was just the trailer. I think it was just for the marketing purposes of it.
BM: Okay. As a director, how much are you open to suggestions from your crew?
DB: I’m very open. I think they trust me as being the guardian of the story and having to go take ideas and filter them so that the screenplay continues to make sense to me as I write it. And I trust them implicitly with running their departments and bringing all of their creative instincts to the work they do, whether it’s animation or production design or editing. Across the board. Because we’ve been working together, more or less the same team for 10 years, we really know one another’s strengths and how to lean on them. And I think there is a sense of trust I afford them and I think they afford me in terms of getting it right.
BM: Are you involved with the Dragons: Rescue Riders preschool show?
DB: No, nothing. No input into that at all. In fact, I haven’t even seen it, but I know that the dragons talk in that series. Unlike The Riders of Berk series, it doesn’t reflect the canon of what we created, where we have dragons that seem to have been part of our natural world.
BM: It’s its own animal, so to speak.
DB: Yeah. I think it’s intended for a very young audience.
“Homecoming”
BM: Sure. And the How To Train Your Dragon: Homecoming holiday special coming up?
DB: I haven’t seen it, either. (laughs) I was part of the pitch of what it could be and I saw a very early version of it in story reels, but yeah, I haven’t seen it.
BM: Wow. So it really is good-bye to this franchise for you, then?
DB: Yes.
BM: What is your next project?
DB: Currently, I am working on a project for Paramount and Hasbro called Micronauts and it’s a live action adaptation. Not even really an adaptation. It’s sort of an invention of a storyline for a 1970s toy line called Micronauts. These interchangeable parts. And that’s fun. That’s world-building and kind of figuring out characters that are resonant and fun.
I’m also working with Mandeville and Universal on a fresh adaptation of Treasure Island. Classic Treasure Island. And that is being written by Evan Spiliotopoulos, but based on a pitch that I came in with and I’ve been working with him on the story details.
BM: That’s live action?
DB: Live action. There’s another project I just sold that will be announced soon. I can’t talk about it yet. And I’m also working on a project here as well with DreamWorks and slowly developing for them. As it is with live action, you try to get a handful of them going because there tend to be a lot of stalls with the projects.
BM: So you’re hedging your bets. The reason why I brought the question is, for Dragons you’ve built up this team. If you go do another project, you’re going to have to leave them behind. Or are you?
DB: Well, no, I think you’re right. Part of the bittersweetness of this decade is that we part ways. Not only are the characters parting ways with the dragons, but we’re parting ways with that world and each other.
BM: That’s sad.
DB: Well, it is sad, but it’s also healthy in the sense that I think we need new creative challenges. And of course we would welcome the opportunity to work together again. But to continue to just making Dragon movies until everybody loses interest, it feels like, I think, a bit of a waste of our kind of creative energies. And so wrapping something up, it definitely feels like the end of an era. But there’s also a source of pride because we accomplished what we set out to do and we did it with integrity intact. And so we can be proud of it. We can look forward to something completely new that stretches us in different ways.
BM: And that’s echoed in your film.
DB: Yeah, yeah. It’s a theme that I’ve always really loved in stories going back to probably The Fox and the Hound and forward with E.T., Harold and Maude, Lost in Translation. The list goes on and on, but where you have these characters from different backgrounds that come together for a period of time and they have such a profound effect on one another that even though they part ways, they’re permanently changed, you know? Their lives are forever altered.
And I love that. It’s really true to life and a compelling narrative paradigm. That’s what this trilogy has become for us. And it reflects where we are in our lives as well.
W.R. Miller and Dean DeBlois – photo (c) 2019 W. R. Miller
Dean DeBlois also discusses How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World in my interview here and in Jackson Murphy’s interview here.
Special thanks to Hannah Orlin, NBC/Universal, and Michael Garcia.
He has just completed Batman: The Animated Interviews, a five-volume work featuring the executives, producers, directors, writers, actors, designers, storyboard artists and composers involved with the making of Batman: The Animated Series and its spinoffs. BearManor Media is the publisher.
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