When it came to animating the vast array of CG dragons in the “How to Train Your Dragon” live-action remake, writer-director Dean DeBlois — who helmed the three DreamWorks animated movies with Chris Sanders (“The Wild Robot”) — had a specific mandate. These dragons need to fit in comfortably with the same photoreal dinosaurs of “Jurassic Park.”
This poses a direct challenge to a lot of the animated designs, well established by Cressida Cowell in her “Dragon” books, which have realistic textures but are expressive and exaggerated — and yet still completely believable in an animated environment. How would the live-action version of the film visually express these dragons’ personalities and hearts?
Related Stories
VFX studio Framestore (led by VFX supervisor Christian Manz and animation supervisor Glen McIntosh) was able to provide more tactile authenticity with their animation. “ In kind of working retroactively, we thought we could lean more into the animal references that inspired those dragons but without the simplification and the exaggeration,” DeBlois told IndieWire. “ And so, with the Monstrous Nightmare, he’s heavily crocodile. The Gronckle is sort of a walrus meets an English bulldog, and the Deadly Nadder is clearly like a tropical bird-inspired creature.”
One notable redesign, though, was the menacing Red Death, the queen of the dragon hive on the Isle of Berk. DeBlois got a second crack at her since there wasn’t enough time to do her justice on the animated original because of a short production schedule.
”So we decided to take a little more time and think about what would a creature that lives in a volcanic caldera look like?” DeBlois said. “And would its armor and coloring reflect its environment? And there was a lot of talk that this is basically an old, lazy lion that gets fed and is very cranky.” The Red Death turned out to be one of the biggest creatures Framestore has ever worked on, given her extensive texture, rigging, and FX.
But there was no big redesign required for Toothless, the mysterious and elusive Night Fury, who bonds with Hiccup (Mason Thames), the reluctant Viking dragon whisperer. DeBlois and Sanders got it right the first time, riffing on “The Black Stallion” for inspiration and emotional resonance. Now it was a matter of figuring out the right size for live action and unleashing the animal within.
“With Toothless, he was always a black panther,” added DeBlois. “That was his design and it stood out apart from the reptilian designs of the other dragons. But he’s so sentient and has such a specific personality that, as we were playing with the design that might have inspired the animated look, we found that the further we went away from it, the less Toothless he became.”
Of course, it is the extremely large and expressive eyes that help define Toothless: a trait he shares with fugitive alien Stitch, which Sanders also designed and has undergone a CG transformation for the “Lilo & Stitch” live-action remake. “And so there’s no animal on earth that has eyes that large, not even the blue whale,” continued DeBlois. “So we realized that we probably have to shrink them down. And, as we did so, we kept losing the character. And so there is just something about his Stitch-like like proportions of the big trashcan mouth and the large eyes and position to the nose and the ears. We had to keep that in order to keep the character.
“And so we started leaning into the very specific musculature and skeleton and texture of the skin, the iridescence of the scales, and tried to bring a sense of credibility without altering too much of the silhouette and the main design features, especially facially.”
But while they slightly scaled down his eyes and head, overall they made Toothless larger and more powerful. They studied cat videos and gleaned little bits that proved useful. Yet the animated performance of Toothless for his intimate scenes with Hiccup was already a touchstone and indelibly etched in the minds of viewers.
“The lane that I picked from the beginning was telling the same story as the animated movie,” said DeBlois. “And I wanted to adhere as closely as we could to those couple of iconic moments, like ‘Forbidden Friendship’ [when Hiccup and Toothless first meet in the cove], or ‘Test Drive’ [when Hiccup first flies on Toothless]. So, in our live-action language, we were trying to mirror the moment as best we can, knowing that it will still be based heavily upon the pacing of John Powell’s music and be emotionally truthful.”
For “Forbidden Friendship,” which represents the most iconic scene in the entire franchise, the director thought it would be nice to treat it very faithfully for the fans. “I would always encourage our animators to take a look at the original ‘Forbidden Friendship’ while they were also considering what they wanted to do with their performance,” continued DeBlois. “And so if there was ever an idea or an expressive beat that for me just rang true and felt memorable, I would encourage them to adopt it in their own way.”
But adapting to live action for the first time was an adjustment for DeBlois. He needed to rely heavily on the actors’ performances. To assist with the scenes between Mason and Toothless, the production was aided by a dragon puppet with articulated mouths, eyes, and ear plates made by the renowned Stitches and Glue. “ And then you had puppeteer Tom Wilton working with Mason Thames and being the scene partner as they’re drawing in the sand as they’re going through that dance,” DeBlois said.
“And every little hesitation and movement that Mason had to react to was being presented live as the cameras were rolling. In this case, Tom’s body would disappear, and there was just a dragon on stage. There was so much thought and sensitivity that went into that performance that it made it very truthful,” added DeBlois.”
“Test Drive” was built around a piece of Powell’s music that dictates its length. What they did with this sequence was look at it through the POV of camera language (Bill Pope of “The Matrix” was the cinematographer) and how they could make it more immersive. “We made it feel as though the cameraman can’t keep up with the subject,” DeBlois said. “The visceral intensity gets dialed up, but it’s also meant to be quite close in terms of its beats and its structure and its length to its animated counterpart.”
For this and the other flying sequences, Framestore worked with the SFX team on the ride-on gimbals, in which each dragon displays a different flight pattern. “The gimbals were on platforms that were about 10 feet tall and could move on six different axes,” DeBlois added. “And then on top of those, we built dragon busts. For each dragon we had chest, neck, and head, and each dragon that were robotic and articulated could be controlled either through the animation that had already been created by our animators at Framestore or live with joysticks.”
This allowed them to put Mason into the saddle on top of this robotic dragon, which was already moving on a gimbal. “But then, depending on how the dragon was flying and pumping its wings, that would affect Mason’s body as well,” DeBlois continued. “He would hold on like a jockey on a horse with his hands further up on the neck. Therefore, if the dragon was diving or ascending or banking or rolling, we would get that effect on Mason.
“We knew once in the hand of the animators, we would get a fantastic performance,” he said. “It was about how we were going to integrate the live-action characters. I think it was the first time it was ever done in that way, so it felt quite groundbreaking but also a little scary because we didn’t know if it was going to work.”
