If, like me, you live in a home populated by small varmints children whose irrational propensity toward things that are “cute” and “fun” and “not terrifying” have transformed your once-mighty DVD/Blu-Ray collection into a depressing miasma of singing cartoon fairy princesses and the like, chance are you cling to animated films with an actual heart and brain – or, at least, those that don’t leave your brains liquified and running out of your ears – like a semi-frozen Leonardo DiCaprio clinging to a piece of floating flotsam for five fucking hours after the Titanic goes down and you’re just looking at your watch and wondering how much longer it’s going to be before he finally dies and Celine can start wailing about the heart going on and you can get to a part of your life that doesn’t involve watching this fucking movie.
MamaPop: Your Home For Colorful Parenting Metaphors
Case in point: How To Train Your Dragon, which was pretty much everything you could hope to find in a Saturday afternoon kid matinée. My own unholy trinity have been watching it nearly nonstop since Santa brought it to our house in late December — and with their conversion to the Church of Fire-Breathing Wonders, the thought occurred to me: what else does dragon cinema have to offer our kids — and what lessons can it teach them?
• How To Train Your Dragon
Above and beyond being one of the most thoroughly entertaining non-Pixar animated films of the past 10 years – as detailed by MamaPop writer/Canadian Jen O! herein – How To Train Your Dragon offers kids several important pieces of information that (with any luck) they can incorporate into their young lives and leverage to reach their full potential as bloodthirsty tyrants human beings. First and foremost, the evolution of Viking/Dragon relations from mutual loathing and kill-or-be-killed ferocity to Avatar-esque “let’s bond on a deep and emotional level and go soaring together through the skies” teaches kids that as much as we may think we know might someone from afar… leaping to conclusions is a dangerous game (and, in this case, one liable to get you roasted and/or fed to giant reptiles), because in the end it turns out we’ve all got a lot more in common than we expect. Kumbaya and bullshit. Second – and even more pertinently for those of us in the parenting ranks – is the lesson offered by protagonist Hiccup. Hiccup is the scion of the Viking King, and is more or less treated as a laughingstock because he fails to live up to that lineage: he’s neither huge and powerful nor fierce and hairy, and as such he’s clearly a tremendous disappointment to a gigantic badass dad who wants nothing more than a son who will follow in his footsteps as a legendary dragon-killer. (Note: naming a child Hiccup is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.) (Note 2: Jay Baruchel = perfect voice casting here.) Of course, this ugly duckling of a Viking turns out to be the emo-intellectual visionary who leads his people into a golden age of peace and prosperity — thereby teaching us the folly of weighing our children too heavily with our own expectations, as well as the immense pride that comes with seeing them find their own way to glory.
Damn. Those are better lessons than I’d expected when I started writing this thing. This dragon idea is gonna work out great!
You are the wind beneath my wiiiiiiiings…
• Reign of Fire
It’s more or less the same movie as How To Train Your Dragon, except instead of being playful and kind of cuddly these dragons are murderous harbingers of the apocalypse, killing virtually every living thing on the planet and destroying every illusion we’ve ever had about our place in the food chain. Otherwise, though… same thing. Reign of Fire‘s Hiccup is Christian Bale, who as a boy watches his mother’s construction project unearth a dragon who starts by killing her – as he watches – and then proceeds to kill just about everything and everyone else. Still, he grows up to become Christian Bale, so it’s not all bad news. And being Christian Bale, he’s naturally the leader of a ragtag group of survivors who hide from the dragon hordes in a castle (because, as everyone knows, dragons generally avoid castles) until Matthew McConaughey shows up with a shaved head and a helicopter and a really exciting idea about how they can turn things around by putting on a show! hunting down and killing the dragons. It’s a great idea and works out wonderfully except for the fact that almost everyone who wasn’t already killed by dragons ends up getting killed by dragons, including shaved headed Matthew McConaughey. Taken as a whole, this translates into a wonderful family film about the dragon apocalypse in which lots of things and people either blow up or get burned to ash by gigantic winged killing machines that cloak the earth like dementors Yankees fans the shadow of death. And lessons! Yes! Great lessons for the kids! Namely, via the kid-who-becomes-Christian Bale scene at the beginning: the unknown should always be feared and avoided because it’s full of things that will kill us and everyone we know. And that’s one to grow on…
Sexiest Man Alivin’ is sweaty work
• Dragonheart
Alright: enough death and misery — let’s get back to the message of teaching our children about understanding and togetherness via the time-honored vehicle of gigantic winged reptiles. And who better to help us than Dennis Quaid (no, not this Quaid) (no, not this one, either) and his mullet? The film features Quaid as a dragon-killing knight of olden times who is lured into a life of grifting by a dragon who persuades him that he is the last of his kind and because he’s got the voice of Sean Connery we know we can trust him so the next thing we know they’re traipsing across the countryside, defrauding villagers in what amounts to a protection racket by having the dragon attack villages while shouting things like “You’re the man now, Dog!” and then Quaid shows up and pretends to kill him and they collect some gold and then move on to the next village… only there’s also an evil Prince who’s played by David Thewlis who looks like a bad guy even when he’s playing a good guy so you know that when he’s playing a bad guy he’s a really truly bad bad guy and – I forgot this part – he’s also got part of Sean Connery’s dragon heart in his own heart (HMO paperwork must’ve been fun on that one) which means they’re somehow connected but anyhow this hot damsel who later became a Starship Trooper and played space football and did some really convincing coed naked space showering hates the evil prince and somehow Dennis Quaid and Sean Connery-as-dragon get involved and there’s lots of fighting and flying and fire-breathing and then Connery yells “Welcome to the Rock!” and then the bad guy dies but so does Connery and it turns out he actually was the last of his kind so now dragons are extinct but since Quaid hooks up with the space football-playing coed-showering babe it doesn’t really matter much. The end. Lesson to children: cheating stupid people for fun and profit is a good idea. As are mullets.
It takes two to make a thing go right.
• The Hobbit
We’re back in animated territory here, as we’re not talking about the maybe-someday-please-god-make-it-happen Peter Jackson adaptation of The Hobbit, but the badass awesometastic animated version of The Hobbit that came out in the ’70s and which clearly offered Jackson the blueprint for much of what followed in his Lord of the Rings trilogy. It’s an adventure story in the best possible sense: a tale of an unlikely hero (the hobbit of the title – Bilbo – who you may remember as Frodo’s father figure from the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring) who finds himself among strange company (a buncha Dwarves) and thrust into an unfamiliar role (thief, adventurer, hero) before finding himself face-to-face with an antagonist for the ages — Smaug, the great and terrible dragon who guards the Dwarves’ treasure in the heart of Lonely Mountain. It’s a wonderful story – and one well-told – but the presence of the dragon serves as both an echo and a precursor to one of the main themes of Tolkein’s work. Like Gollum, whom Bilbo encounters earlier in the story, Smaug lives alone with his treasure in a tomb of stone, isolated from the world and consumed by his avarice — until the unlikely intrusion of a tiny Hobbit not only signals the vanishing of his treasure but the unveiling of the weakness that will ultimately destroy him (for Smaug, the weakness is literal: an exposed section on his armored hide through which he is vulnerable; for Gollum, it is the metaphoric weakness of his insatiable greed for his Precious (the ring, of course) that will lead to the enticingly-and-not-at-all-drenched-in-foreshadowing-named Mount Doom at the finale of The Return of the King). Dragon lesson for kids: sharing = good, selfish and greedy = bad.
OMGOMGOMGOMGOMG
• Starsky & Hutch
Dragon lesson here: um… jail is bad. ‘Nuff said.
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