As A Parent, The Live-Action How To Train Your Dragon Movie Was Way More Emotional Than I Expected

I never got into the How to Train Your Dragon animated movies, and I missed the big live-action remake when it hit the 2025 movie schedule earlier this year, but I decided to check it out when it came out on home release after hearing so many good things about it. My wife, kids, and I recently kicked off a weekend with this family-friendly adventure film, and while I expected it to be fun, exciting, and fantastical, the emotional tone genuinely caught me off guard.

Sure, with this being a film marketed towards children, I had a feeling there’d be some emotion sprinkled in between massive action set pieces and dazzling special effects. However, this movie shot an arrow straight through my heart.

Going In, I Thought The Movie Would Just Be About Vikings Fighting Dragons

Going into How to Train Your Dragon (again, I didn’t watch the original DreamWorks animated films), I thought this was going to be a big movie about the Vikings fighting dragons. Don’t get me wrong, this is very much a movie where Vikings team up to fight all kinds of dragons that keep stealing their food, killing their families, and burning their villages to the ground.

I didn’t really know what to expect, but I thought I’d spend a couple of hours watching Gerard Butler looking cool as can be, wearing layers of fur and an awesome helmet as he led his people to a better tomorrow while his on-screen son tried to find a different approach to the whole dragon problem. Both are true, but the movie is so much more than that…

Instead, This Is About A Father And Son Repairing Their Fractured Relationship And Overcoming Grief

At the core of How to Train Your Dragon is the story of a father (Gerard Butler’s Stoick the Vast) and son (Mason Thames Hiccup Horrendous) trying to repair their broken relationship and overcome grief in their own ways. Those ways, as we see multiple times in the early goings of the movie (and even later after Hiccup reveals he’s been training Toothless), largely don’t work for the most part, and the father and son are pulled further apart from one another.

Once I found that father-son angle, I was hooked and down for the ride. Don’t get me wrong, there were other emotional elements throughout this movie, but How to Train Your Dragon’s story of two people trying to find meaning in life after experiencing a devastating tragedy just hit really hard.

I Don't Know If The Animated Movies Are This Emotional, But Now I Want To Check Them Out

Like I said, I haven’t watched a single frame of the animated How to Train Your Dragon movies, and I know next to nothing about them. That said, I want to check them out, and I plan on making that happen sooner rather than later. The franchise is one of the few newer series my kids haven’t watched yet, so I think it could make for another great Friday Movie Night experience. Because let’s be real, I’m all about watching movies with my kids, especially when it’s something none of us has seen before.

If you haven’t watched How to Train Your Dragon and you’re looking for something that both audiences and critics seem to love, why not add it to your list!