As The Nose On Your Face
Why have so few critics tuned into the political/war metaphor in How To Train Your Dragon? It seems obvious as hell to me, and yet the ones I’ve read have steered clear, perhaps feeling that it’s somehow inappropriate to mention our Middle East conflict when discussing a family film. And yet the filmmakers had no problem weaving in a pronounced lefty-peacenik message about understanding your enemy and getting past the knee-jerk instinct to draw swords etc.
Not mentioning this is like reviewing Gone With The Wind and not saying it’s basically a Great Depression metaphor that praises tenacity and gumption.
The only critic who seems to have spotted the liberal Dragon metaphor (besides myself) is the New York Post‘s Kyle Smith. He’s riled by it, being of an apparent conservative bent, but at last he’s discussed it.
“One interesting aspect of the movie, apart from the design, is that it puts so much effort into projecting a moral,” Smith writes. “Hiccup begins to think about a different approach to dragon-human relations. Shouldn’t the dragon wars stop? Shouldn’t we all live together in a warm, friendly human-dragon commune? Hiccup tells the dragons, ‘Everything we know about you guys is wrong‘ and believes the beasts are not killers — ‘They defend themselves, that’s all.’”
“Of his own folk, he says, ‘The food that grows here is tough and tasteless — the people, even more so.’
“Hurrah for all this. Really, it’s never too soon to get your kids to accept that their own culture is pathetic — and that the alien one their society is at perpetual war with is really friendly, peace-loving and misunderstood. Hiccup may not be much of a dragon-slayer but in the sequel maybe he’ll go on to a brilliant career in the State Department.”
Here’s how I put it:
“How To Train Your Dragon is quite pronounced in its liberal metaphorical messaging. The core theme is the saga of the young finding their own way — about the young minds of a Viking tribe standing up for their own beliefs and defying traditional ways. But it’s also Avatar-like in that it’s about (a) befriending the supposed ‘enemy’ and (b) thereby breaking the bonds of an age-old warfare tradition — i.e., in order to be ‘proud Vikings’ (i.e., good Americans) we must defeat and destroy those who threaten us.
“The proverbial baddies were alluded to in Richard Lester‘s How I Won The War as the ‘wily pathan,’ and if you let your mind go you could view the dragons as a metaphor for ‘them’ — i.e., terrorists, Islamic fundamentalists, those who would attack and kill us.
“In line with this, the big super-dragon which all the smaller dragons serve could be seen as Islamic jihad, the theology of martyrdom, radical fundamentalism, etc. The super-beast, the film is saying, is the real enemy because left to their own devices the regular dragons are actually fairly cool pets (i.e., just like the big screeching lizard birds the Na’vi flew around on in Avatar) who respond to petting and training and whatnot.”
or the dragons could be seen as the Tea Partiers so villified by the left.
Oh my God…I don’t think so! The Tea Party thugs breathe a kind of fire, but otherwise they’re more mosquitoes than dragons. A political movement that needs to sprayed into silence and submission.
Jeff, making a friend of a supposed “natural” enemy is as old as Aesop. (In the original How To Train… book, Hiccup raises Toothless by means of being a “Dragon Whisperer” as opposed to a Viking Shouter.) Is there anything specific in the film that distinctly says present-day Terrorists is THE metaphor?
Smith can be extremely tiresome when he bashes a movie on political grounds. Which is too bad because he’s one of the few conservative film critics who actually seems to, y’know, actually *like* movies. (Unlike, say, Medved, who acts like watching films is a chore.)
Well, if it’s a metaphor then the obvious recommendation is that we’re supposed to turn those in the Middle East into pets and ride around on their backs.
Or since the actual reason for the violence is what it is (don’t want to spoil it) we actually need to kill Allah so that we can then ride around on their backs.
Smith’s argument is that the movie teaches kids to view their own culture as pathetic.
I think he’s overlooking the fact that Hiccup is a disaffected teenagers and ALL disaffected teenagers view their culture, their parents, their parents interests, etc. to be pathetic.
Through the process of establishing his own identity, it is quite by accident that Hiccup discovers the dragons aren’t evil.
“Jeff, the idea of not-so-nice people with gumption and selfishness being better survivors than decent caring people when times are tough and the chips are down is as old as the parting of the Red Sea. Is there anything specific in Gone With the Wind that distinctly says that the Great Depression of the 1930s is THE metaphor? I mean, it’s about the Civil War, right?” — Spartan Tell
Jeff: Ouch. But I see your point.
“People who talk in metaphors oughta shampoo my crotch.” ~ Melvin Udall
I thought DW was just going for the Pixar approach of cribbing from Ghibli myself, since this is clearly inspired from Nausicaa.
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