How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World

Who would have imagined that one of the most noteworthy exemplars of the High Romantic Sublime would be a movie for children, indeed, the third installment in the franchise How to Train Your Dragon.  This film is what might be called a cartoon -- although, in fact, none of it is drawn:  rather, the movie is an elaborate computer generated animation, a state-of-the-art assemblage of colorful pixels, programmed by the digital wizards working for Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks.   Although the plot is generally insipid and the human characters uninspired, the scenes showing combat between a vast armada of ships and thousands of dragons are genuinely phantasmagoric, a delirious extravaganza of color and motion.  Similarly, images depicting the titular hidden world, apparently the spawning territory for the dragons, are exuberantly psychedelic.  The picture is beautiful almost beyond belief, a tempest of diving and soaring through vast spaces illumined by iridescent cave formations or huge icy grottos.  In the upper world, above the torrents of ocean draining into an enormous misty maelstrom, it's always the "magic hour" -- the sun held in a suspense over an orange-yellow horizon, long shadows cast by the towering cliffs and trees, a glowing void such as those painted by Claude Lorrain. 

In Paradise Lost, Milton imagines Lucifer, the morning star, falling from the crystalline battlements of heaven, plunging into the fiery abyss a full nine-days falling.  This is the sort of imagery presented in this film -- the picture combines the cosmic dimensions of Milton's vertical paradise and hell with wild imagery from the Battle in Heaven:  elephantine creatures with fire blossoming around them as they soar through space like enormous dirigibles.  In some scenes, we see buzzing, infernal hordes of dragons, many of them insect-shaped, pouring in huge multi-colored plumes through a sky in which the sun is always setting or through towering ramparts of cumulo-nimbus clouds cleft by lightning.  The dragons en masse sometimes look like flocks of nimble, brightly colored parrots -- in other scenes, they are like the rebel angels poured out of heaven in Bosch and Brueghel's paintings or the swarms of hideous winged beasts flapping leathery wings over the Inferno.  The Miltonic sublime re-occurs at the dawn of the 19th century in Wordsworth -- particularly passages such as the crossing of the Alps in The Prelude  -- and in Coleridge's nightmarish vistas of the Arctic ice in his Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner (as well, I suppose, as the "caverns measureless to man" in Kubla Khan's Xanadu very much on display in this film):  Shelley's longer poems particularly the ones on Mont Blanc and the Witch of Atlas explore this enormous, inhuman space echoing with the cascades of innumerable waterfalls and Mary Shelley parodies the form in Frankenstein and, of course, both Byron and Melville exploit these effects in their books.  This kind of grandiose imagery drives How to Train Your Dragon.  In the pixel film, the dragons attack a huge armada in the twilight -- the masts tall as mighty sequoias are set on fire by the flame-throwing jaws of the dragons.  When the masts fall, we see hundreds of tiny figures on the decks of the burning ships, scurrying this way and that -- it's an enormous, terrifying image, something like Milton's Samson pulling down the temple of the Philistines in Samson Agonistes.  Everything is aerial, a dream of flight -- soaring, falling across the screen from top to bottom, diving, plummeting, winged figures toppling down from the heavens, plunging through infinite, glowing spaces.  The spectacle is overwhelming and hallucinatory.

The film's plot has something to do with a toy-like hero rescuing two dragons, a black male and a white female, from the clutches of a long-jawed blonde-haired Aryan villain at the helm of the biggest ship in the armada.  (The two dragons are odd creatures, winged salamanders that spit radioactive-looking fire a bit like Godzilla -- the male salamander is a little clumsy; he is ardently in love with the white female who looks more like a very expensive and haughty cat - she has huge eyes and is exquisitely feline in the way that she moves.  The best aspects of the film are pure animation -- almost abstract sequences that focus on the dragons and let us see how they move and fly:  the pas de deux between the male and female dragons is wonderfully subtle and erotic.)  The film is the Whitest film most Caucasian film that I know -- there are no people or characters of color in this picture ostensibly derived from Nordic folklore.  In fact, the "hidden world" of the title is beneath a maelstrom in which the seas of the earth empty in enormous cataracts of white, frenzied water and the imagery is derived, I think, primarily from Edgar Alan Poe's Narrative of A. Gordon Pym and his story "The Descent into the Maelstrom".)  There's some dull dialogue and a little uplifting stuff about achieving the impossible -- it seems like one of the chief, and most pernicious, lies being disseminated to the children of today is that, if the spirit is willing, anything can be achieved, something that is palpably and, often, tragically false.  The human characters are animated so that carefully delineated expressions of grief, bewilderment, wonder, fear, anger, self-righteousness, humor etc. succeed one another in rapid gales -- this is deeply and profoundly unreal.  In general, people don't show much emotion on their faces but this movie insists on depicting so many motions in chaotic flight over the faces of the protagonists that they seem to be twitching in a frenetic seizure. 

This movie has to be seen on the big screen, preferably, I suppose, under the influence of some mind-altering substance. It's wonderful and crazy and astonishing.