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I have always admired and enjoyed the How to Train Your Dragon franchise for its maturity and distinct lack of Dreamworks clichés. Their lone franchise that’s blissfully free of never-ending lazy pop culture references and jokes, celebrity voices that don’t fold into the material but stand apart from it, and a sense that each film is building upon the other to really explore the lore and material. The Hidden World is a fitting and emotionally satisfying coda to the whole enterprise.
Much like the second film picked up years after the original so does this one. At this point, Berk and its various citizens have been living harmoniously with their dragons in a stasis that has lulled them into a false sense of security. Hiccup and his friends have gotten sloppy in their escapades against dragon hunters by relying too often on muscle power in lieu of competent strategy.
Each film in the trilogy is about Hiccup’s coming of age and The Hidden World represents his maturation into a king. Part of that maturity is learning to separate himself from Toothless, his dragon companion, for the benefit of both species. That last bit is the real emotional crux of the film as Hiccup and Toothless must essentially divide their kingdoms and lose their codependency.
If these final steps of growing up and evolving away from childish things is the main scope of this film, then it makes it smallest of the three. I’m fine with that as it also emerges as the most emotional engaging by really allowing its quietest scenes to speak loudly and disrupting them with brutal guerilla warfare from the trilogy’s finest villain, an ever-patient dragon hunter bent on killing the last of the Night Furies.
Having said all that, there is a certain amount of sameness that permeates the final entry. Long-lasting franchises develop a language and series of short hands that make true innovation harder and harder to develop as it goes on. Notice how every Star Wars film shrinks a massive universe down to a series of families squabbling so too does The Hidden World recycle tropes and beats from the prior films. It may lack the newness of the earliest entry, but it demonstrates a remarkable amount of growth and manages to make goodbye bittersweet. I call that a success.
