How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World

It's hard to fathom that it's been nine years since How to Train Your Dragon was first released in 2010. My daughter was 9 years old and still hot for Justin Beiber. 

Now with the third film in the franchise, my daughter is 18 years old and long since outgrown her Justin Beiber phase. 

With How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, we're not just to the third film in the series but it's last.  Yes, it is our last visit to the Viking village of Berk and the dragons they live with together in peace and harmony. 

It is our last adventure with Hiccup and his dragon, Toothless. 

One of the interesting aspects of the Dragons series is how it resists the trope that "the status quo is God". In the first film, Hiccup is just a boy who sustains a permanent injury in the loss of part of this leg. 

By the second film, he's a young man with the leadership of Berk thrust upon him with the death of his father. 

How to Train Your Dragon is not shy about defying the conventional expectations of an animated film with kid appeal by actually have characters suffer consequences and experience growth. 

With this, the final installment of the series, all bets are off as to what destiny awaits Hiccup, Toothless, the village of Berk and the dragons.  

Berk is a utopia of humans and dragons living together in peace as Hiccup and Toothless lead rescue parties to rescue captured dragons. 

But success comes with a price. 

The dragon population is growing at such a rate as to almost overwhelm Berk's resources.

And Berk is becoming a bit too conspicuous to those who would do harm to dragons such as the infamous dragon hunter Grimmel the Grisly who has is eye set on capturing the last of the Night Fury dragons, our pal Toothless.  

As part of his plan to snare Toothless, Grimmel is using a Light Fury, a white female dragon who is the same species as Toothless.   Toothless becomes hopelessly smittened with the Light Fury.

Meanwhile there's a lot of pressure of Hiccup and Astrid to get married already.  But Hiccup as Berk's leader has more pressing concerns: the protection of the humans and the dragons of Berk. 

This leads Hiccup to seek out a place of legend spoken of by his late father, a place known only as "The Hidden World", a place separate from our world where dragons live a part from humans. If Hiccup can find the Hidden World, it's a place where the people and the dragons under his care can live in peace, safe from attack.  

Hiccup keeps putting stress on himself to solve all the problems of Berk and maintain the utopia of humans and dragons living together. When Toothless and the Light Fury find the Hidden World and Hiccup and Astrid follow them there, Hiccup realizes it is a perfect place for dragons to live in safety. But it is not hospitable to humans.   

But time is running out as Grimmel and his forces are bearing down to take the dragons of Berk leaving Hiccup with some hard choices to make.   

How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World does bring the series to an end. The world being built since the first movie reaches a critical crossroads and is fundamentally changed. 

Spoiler: no one in the main cast dies this time or suffers a permanent injury. But Hiccup has grown considerably since we last met him in terms of maturity and wisdom. He is still a brilliant inventor and schemer thinking outside the boundaries of his society and he still possess the naivete that comes from the kind of expansive and forward thinking. But that naivete is tempered by experience and wisdom gained from age and the assumption of authority over his tribe.  

There is a beautiful coda at the end that skips a bit into Hiccup's future with a brief and poignant reminder that although consigned to myth, mystery and legend, dragons are real.