How To Train Your Dragon 2

I'll say they're rigged. Cartoon Network wasn't a sponsor, so no Cartoon Network shows won anything.

Issues with Annie's was that you used to be able to buy memberships to vote so Dreamwork had previously bought them for all their employees. Disney (rightfully) complained about it so they've since completely overhauled their voting procedure, so HTTYD 2's win was legit.

Was The LEGO Movie at least nominated?

http://screenrant.com/how-train-your-dragon-3-finale-ending-director/

Please tell me this isn't true for How to Train Your Dragon 3. The "childhood friend leaving/dying" plot is SO CLICHE.

Plus, it's a double-edged sword because if it's good? Nobody will be able to watch it more than once, and it's going to bomb financially because people will be going "TOO MANY FEELS IT WEARS ME OUT :( ." If it's bad? It's going to be Chicken Soup For The Soul levels of schmaltz that How to Train Your Dragon REALLY doesn't deserve.

What's wrong with having "Dragons + Vikings = Awesome" permanently? Everyone's fine with that!

There's plenty of ways to wrap up the series without doing that "Oh noes, Toothless is leaving forever bye!" deal.

Since when do people not like rewatching films that they feel strongly for? Since when do movies bomb because they try to evoke emotions? Do people refuse to rewatch the first two movies because there are sad moments? I think not. The idea that people will refuse to revisit a movie they liked because there are "TOO MANY FEELS" is, well, ridiculous.

And, well, I don't know how Dubois plans to execute this, but if you ask me the idea of the dragons departing cannot simply function as a symbolic "childhood friend leaving" thing, because Toothless and the dragons have been so much more than just something that can neatly represent the whimsicality of childhood. They had massive effects on everyone's lives and the way Berk as a society functioned. If they depart, the message would probably be something like "the world changes, and you have to adapt and change with it".

By the way, if they're going to reuse Drago as an antagonist and add more depth to him, it really makes me wish they had gone with their original plans for the second movie and just made Valka the antagonist and cut Drago out of that movie entirely. The conflation of their two storylines was, in my opinion, that film's chief blunder. It left Drago as an underdeveloped villain, and Valka with little of importance to actually do in the story.

edited 6th Feb '15 1:36:05 PM by DrDougsh

I admit that's just my personal view, but it's a pretty big hazard for people to only watch a movie once or twice BECAUSE it's so good, which will definitely limit profits. "Rewatch value" is just as important as "watch at all" value.

There's a lot of things that can ruin a good movie's re-watch value—being too clever and knowing what's going to happen now that you've watched it once, being so moving that it leaves you worn out, and usually the higher end of the cathartic-endings spectrum in general.

http://blog.peopleschoice.com/2014/12/24/movies-you-cant-rewatch/

edited 6th Feb '15 1:39:29 PM by Sharysa

Honestly, I don't think rewatch value is that important when it comes to moviemaking. From a financial standpoint, the main point is to get many people to pay to see the movie once, either in cinemas or by buying the movie for home viewing. If they buy it, they can watch it as many times as they want for free, making rewatch value irrelevant from the producer's standpoint.

And I dunno, "too many feels" is certainly not an incentive I'd ever have for not watching a movie again, if I really liked it. If anything, quite the opposite. If the first "Dragons" movies hadn't had any emotion and had just been nonstop dragon/viking action fun, I probably wouldn't have revisited them. I would have had fun, but I probably wouldn't have watched them again.

edited 6th Feb '15 1:45:24 PM by DrDougsh

People rewatch tear-jerking movies all the time!

You may not think "too many feels" is a legitimate reason not to watch a movie again, but it's not that people DON'T want to rewatch certain things they enjoy—it's that they CAN'T. There's just this intense emotional response that some people get, which legitimately turns them off watching a movie again.

I can't watch Toy Story 3 or Deathly Hallows 2 again. Not "don't want to"; I can't go through the whole "fuck, my childhood is ended, what do I do now" catharsis again. I watched them both in theaters and both times, I spent about a week emotionally numb, because over ten years of my life are now gone. Other people don't have that reaction—either the sting is gone, or they enjoy the highly personal experience of those films, and so they can rewatch it every month. That's cool.

For non-nostalgia movies, I can't watch "Up" again. It's a lovely movie, but it hits too close to the bone with so many family-related emotions that I can't rewatch it. I don't want to go through the emotional rollercoaster again, even though I love that movie.

Not trying to sway you into "WE MUST BOYCOTT HTTYD 3 BECAUSE I DISAGREE WITH THE HALF-FINISHED PLOT IDEA." Just pointing out that "the movie is too good to watch twice" is an actual phenomena that happens a lot.

It's like Crocs—they made an indestructible shoe, and a few years later they realized that nobody was buying Crocs anymore because they didn't NEED more Crocs, so they had to expand the crap out of their company.

As for the first two "Dragons" movies, they have rewatch value because they're neither nonstop fun or nonstop feels. They have a really great balance of both, and I feel that this potential plot for the third movie is going to tip it too far into the emotional side.

edited 6th Feb '15 2:17:27 PM by Sharysa

Add me to the camp of "physically cannot watch Toy Story 3."

...... but that still means you ARE ABLE to watch those. You are not completely shut off from every single outlet you can see them. You are still talking about your own decisions.

Yeah, well, even if there is a significant amount of people who don't want to... sorry, can't re-watch movies like that, it hardly seems like something the studio, either from an artistic or business standpoint should be concerned about, or let deter themselves from making the best movie they can. Like I said, I don't think re-watchability is that huge a factor in a movie's commercial success.

At any rate, I doubt Deblois's intention is to make a dour movie that's no fun. All he's divulged is a component of a proposed ending, not a whole synopsis describing endless misery for Hiccup and Toothless. And to be honest, the fact that he's willing to divulge his idea for the ending so far in advance is reason enough to suspect that there's more to it than he's letting on.

I'd also question if this idea is really as cliché as you're making it out to be. Yeah, there's many kid's stories that involve the "end of childhood" with the protagonist losing some token of innocence and whimsy, but there haven't been many modern kids' films that I'm aware of to go in that direction. And even so, like I said, I don't think the departure of the dragons is necessarily just going to herald the stereotypical "end of childhood" story, because a) Hiccup is already not a child and b) the Dragons, unlike the toys in Toy Story, aren't really very emblematic of childhood innocence, and couldn't be easily fit in that thematic role as a whole.

I'm not saying this idea is automatically a good one, but there's no reason to dismiss it out of hand without knowing anything about how it's going to be executed. I'm cautiously optimistic about it. If nothing else, even if it's not done well, I kind of admire Dublois's willingness to take his story to new places with each film, and not just do the safe thing by keeping Hiccup at the same place he was in the beginning.

edited 6th Feb '15 4:23:59 PM by DrDougsh

All right, dropping the "this kind of plot might wear the audience out too much" point because people seem to be condescending of (or at least not quite grasp) the effect of an audience's emotional/psychological response to movies.

I didn't intend to say "they shouldn't make an awesome movie because it might be too awesome." I meant to say "if they don't balance out the emotions properly, they're going to end up with a fantastic movie that people won't want to watch often because it's too cathartic/tearjerking/poignant." Alternately, "if they go with the "dragons leave forever" plot, they might have an ending that's technically great, but doesn't match with rest of the series."

Hiccup isn't a child anymore, but the basic coming-of-age trope (not-quite adult to full-fledged adult) is still the same.

As for "they shouldn't pay attention to the audience AT ALL," there's "not letting the audience rule you" and then there's "not giving a fuck about the audience." The example of the latter is How I Met Your Mother.

Started out great, but it was becoming increasingly evident that 1) they refused to work with the stuff they'd discovered organically, and 2) they gradually stopped giving a shit about their audience. The ending is widely considered horrible not only on a technical standpoint, but how insulting it is to the audience.

You can't have a series without viewers, and not even TRYING to take their feelings into account is either selfish or stupid on a creator's standpoint. This is why we have previews (screenings or shows), so theater/film can test things out and rework things to fit the audiences' taste better.

I like dragons. You can develop a LOT of things regarding the societal/technological effects of dragons without going "oh and then they leave forever, bye."

edited 7th Feb '15 3:15:03 PM by Sharysa

What difference does it even make to you? From your standpoint they HAVE left forever once they've made their final movie. Your love for dragons won't be any less undernourished henceforth if the last movie ends with the dragons still in Berk.

I love the Dragons franchise and Hiccup and Toothless' friendship, but I still think a bittersweet ending ala But Now I Must Go for the dragons in the end could actually be a great way to wrap things up just for how powerful it would be. After all, we've had the "bad guy shows up->Hiccup and his friends defeat him->"we have... dragons!" narration ending twice now, we're gonna have it used a third time? And the book series did start with "There were dragons when I was a boy..." Perhaps they could have the film explain why they disappeared as the book simply mentioned they slowly vanished into the sea "from whence they came" and nobody knew why.

Imagine an ending similar to The Water Horse, where a boy finds an egg that turns out to contain a strange creature eventually beginning the legend of the Loch Ness monster. The boy and "nessie" grow close and have adventures, but at the end of the film, the waterhorse has to leave. The boy is telling their story as an old man and after he's finished, we cut to another young boy out exploring who comes across a similar egg, hinting at a repeat of the story. What if HTTYD pulled something similar, where Hiccup's grandson- or daughter is out exploring in the woods and comes across signs of a dragon, perhaps even an egg.

Oh and if they do go for that kind of ending, I'm guessing it means it will definetely have the line "We had... dragons." just to really cut people's hearts out.

I would love that very much.

I probably wouldn't mind the whole "the dragons vanished" premise if it happened a bit further down the line.

By the logic of this premise, the dragons were only allies to the people of Berk for a few years, after possibly centuries of being their enemies. Berk only had them for one generation, Hiccup's generation, but after that they just vanished? Kind of makes what Hiccup accomplished a bit pointless in the long run. The way they made things out to be, i expected this to last for at least three more generations. One generation of having dragons as Berk's allies after who knows how many of having them as enemies isn't really something that will go down in the Island's history books or whatever.

My reception of this is still the same, that the movies are lifting the ending from the book series despite the situations between the books.

The books, from what I understand, are about Hiccup coming of age in a world which has had dragons for quite a while, and which has become so dependent on dragons, and has used them in unwise ways so long, that in the end the leaving the dragons becomes the fitting end to a world that needed to let them go and forge themselves without them (similar to, but not the same as, the elves leaving in Lo TR).

The movies, on the other hand, are explicitly about Hiccup trying through a lot of sacrifice to build a better society in a world where everyone involved has always been fighting. The Vikings aren't complacent with their dragons - much to the contrary: every bit of media in the movie continuity is about the groups discovering more about each other, and being improved through the diplomacy and coexistence that came through Hiccup's example. There is a huge "we're all part of the same world" theme that runs through the movies.

As a result, in this context the ending reverses the themes of the movies - especially the first, but also the themes in the second of Hiccup being the best of both worlds, and the only one who can bind them together - by enforcing the idea that these groups shouldn't live together, and even despite Hiccup's best efforts coexistence is only temporary.

I assume the idea looked nice and dramatic on paper, though.

edited 15th Feb '15 9:04:15 PM by KnownUnknown

The two of you make very good points. Obviously and/or hopefully, in the case of the "dragons vanishing" ending, they have a proper build up and reason for it happening rather than it being "just because" to make a dramatic ending. I also read a leaked thing somewhere though where the name of the last soundtrack of the third film will be "Goodbye". ... I mean, it sounds like it could only mean one thing. I stand by what I said before that it would kind of end up repetitive for the third film to have the same formula of defeating whatever bad guy shows up + "we have dragons!" ending. Another thing to keep in mind is how dark/realistic and/or daring turns these films have taken for being animated family pictures; in the first film, Hiccup loses his leg. In the second, Toothless is mind controlled and kills his dad. The third film will have to continue and most likely top the formula to make the finale, which I could easily see being the twist of Hiccup having to say goodbye to Toothless someday. And as heartbreaking as I know it would be, I personally think it'll be a good way to end the franchise to give it that realistic and bittersweet edge. I can just imagine how much people will cry at a goodbye scene between the two. Heck, it would be like any of those "person with his animal" films you cry at because of the animal leaving or dying at the end. You're sad, but in a "good" way, because of all the emotions it gave you, and it's sure to leave a lasting impression. It might also be a good lesson to kids as, from what I recall, there hasn't been many animated films recently teaching them lessons like there not always being happy endings and sometimes you have to say goodbye to someone you love, but it's okay as life goes on etc. Again though, they would have to make the proper story leading up to it and at least imply the reason for the dragons disappearing (as I don't think the books explained at all?), as indeed for them to vanish suddenly and for no reason would leave people questioning the ending more than enjoying it, but as long as they did write the proper story around it, I fully support their decision of ending it that way... IF it's indeed what they're intending.

The soundtrack being named "Goodbye" though...

edited 10th Mar '15 4:07:03 PM by scrooge20mcduck

So I just watched this.

Let us all bow our heads in memory of Stoick the Vast. He lived and died as a man.]]

I actually did know it would happen, as I accidentally read spoilers, but it was just so fast. He didn't even get any last words. He was done before the smoke had even lifted. That's harsh man.

I don't know where this series will go from here, but it's clearly not afraid of shaking things up a bit.

I was crying like a BABY in the theater over Stoick dying. I actually got weird looks from a few people.

But seriously, Stoick was one of my favorite characters and it made me just so freaking happy that he and Valka were together again, and then he lays his life down for Hiccup. When I watched it, I had this sick feeling in my stomach, I knew what would happen, but oh gosh, did it hurt. Although I felt good that they actually did a viking funeral instead of just having him die and showing everyone sad in the aftermath or something. Or just getting a brief shot of the funeral with nothing happening other than "Come on, Audience, cry! Daddy died!"

So I just caught this:

If only Stoick had actually thought of that in the movie. Shame that.

Axes solve a lot of things, don't they?

Can't help but fear though, that throwing it that may might cause Drago to still spear Valka in his death throes. Still worth a shot, though.

The Plot Twist and the random musical number when Stoick and his wife gets together again is the only things I hate about the film. ESPECIALLY THE LATTER.

That part was the complete opposite for me. I love that scene. One of the best and memorable parts from the movie.