- Released: 23 December 2021
- Amount of seasons: 1
- Seasons watched: 1
- Rating: 3.5/5
Synopsis
1000+ years after the events of How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, a boy named Tom and his friends discover the Hidden World and the dragons it holds, befriending some of them in the process. It is now up to them to protect these dragons, all the while researchers are trying to get to the bottom of what the Hidden World exactly is and what it hides.
My Thoughts
I wasn't that excited for this when it was first announced, but I did definitely want to give it a chance. I've so far mostly seen negative takes on this show only, but those seem to mostly come from people who haven't even watched it. The main claim they make is that this is milking the franchise. Do I think so?
No, not this series in particular, and the reason is simple: they already were milking it long before. Three movies is okay, but after those we also got 6 short films/specials, and four to five spinoff shows depending on how you count, at least one of which also has a few movie-length specials. So if you ask me they were milking it already long before Nine Realms. This is just another unneeded addition to the canon, but to decry this as milking and none of the material before just feels a bit weird to me.
Anyways, onto the show. The premise is quite simple. A boy named Tom (heavily implied to be Hiccup's descendant) and his researcher mother arrive at a fissure caused by a recent meteor, which also happened to have opened a cave leading to the Hidden World, resulting in some rogue dragons getting out. Tom, and later his friends, befriend these dragons. Tom bonds with a Night Light (yeah, we'll get to the genetic implications of that later) named Thunder, who is obviously Toothless's great-times-twenty-grandson of something. Now the kids have to keep the dragons safe.
Kind of a modern take on the same plot as the later How to Train Your Dragon movies (and some of the series) had, with having to protect the dragons from hunters (or rather, researchers and their corporate overlord this time). However, as of now the series doesn't really go beyond this premise.
It's not episodic or semi-serialized, it's pretty much (so far) a continuous story that's being told, which is somewhat different from Race to the Edge, for example, which was semi-serialized. Does this bother me? Not really, but it does have the disadvantage that we don't really get to bond with our characters (outside of Tom and Thunder, I guess) yet. Pretty much each episode of the series so far covers one of the friend group getting a dragon, with only the last having a different premise.
It started out with Tom rescuing and bonding with Thunder in the two-parter, then Jun with Wu/Wei next episode, then D'Angelo with Plowhorn, and finally elusive Alex with Feathers. On the background there's an ongoing story of the earthquakes around the research facility and the researchers trying to go down to find out what exactly is happening in the fissure.
But for the most part it feels very simple and like we only get to know our main characters on a surface level. I didn't even get that much of an impression on D'Angelo's character, sadly enough. Tom and Jun get the most screen time, followed by Alex who does have a few unique quirks, but D'Angelo right now only really came across as a friendly guy who likes helping animals, with (so far) nothing else really to him. It'd be nice if he had a little more going on than a surface-level personality. I'm not saying the other cast is 100% well-developed and three-dimensional, either, but we really needed more episodes and time with our main cast to properly establish them.
The animation and visuals are far from perfect but pretty standard as far as these CGI Dreamworks shows go. I don't think they're a huge step up or down from the previous Dragons series, just standard. The flying animations are a bit stiff, but that's pretty much par for the course with these shows.
Speaking of which, let's address the bicolor elephant in the room: Thunder the Night Light. When his design was first revealed the Dragons fanbase kinda went nuts for a day or so. Not as much as the Light Fury, but still. So what's the big deal? Well, Thunder is a bi-colored Fury and revealed to be a Night Light in canon supplementary materials. This wouldn't be a problem...except for the fact that the series takes place like 1300 years after the first actual Night Lights were born. Meaning it's downright genetically impossible for Thunder to have these colors (or be of the Night Light hybrid species even, since Toothless was the last Night Fury) without a lot of incest having taken place in the Night Lights population over the years. Which just has all kinds of yikes implications, doesn't it?
From a character design POV: I get it. The Light Fury design wasn't that appealing (and widely hated), and with Thunder being a descendant of Toothless they probably wanted him to look more like his (great-times-twenty grand)daddy. But the implications it has is just all weird. Unless Toothless really wasn't the last Night Fury this just doesn't make any sense.
Thunder's design itself I do like. I've seen a lot of people criticize it (but, again, not as much as the LF), but it's honestly okay to me. It is a bit proportionally weird compared to the other Furies we've seen, but I do think it looks cute and I like how his markings resemble my cat. The other dragon designs are quite varying (as is tradition with the Dragons franchise) but I like them well enough. It just has some unfortunate implications with Thunder's design. It would've genetically made much more sense for him to be a Light Fury (maybe with some very minor Night attributes to hint at Toothless' ancestry).
The human character designs are honestly all fine in my opinion. My only gripe is Tom's eyes; they're too small. And it wouldn't even bother me if it wasn't for the fact that most other character's eyes are 1.5 times to twice as big as his proportionally. Just a weird choice design-wise that clashes with the other characters we see.
The six episodes are honestly another problem. It's too short a season to properly establish everything. I think we'd have needed two more at least if we wanted to get a proper impression of the goings-ons at the fissure, the conflict between Tom and his mother, the main cast (obviously) and the dragons of the Hidden World. We do get some basics, but it all feels kinda rushed and bare bones due to the short running time of the season. I do think we may be getting more, which may solve this problem, but it's just a bit too short to properly introduce us and get the viewer invested into the concepts it's trying to get across.
So what is my overall thoughts on this series? Not good. Not bad. Just slightly above average. Writing-wise I'd say it's about on part with the other Dragons animated series (except the spinoff for babies). Nothing fancy but nothing downright horrible either. It's just average if not a bit rushed. I won't recommend this to anyone, but if you're curious it doesn't hurt in checking it out, either. Just don't think too much about the implications behind Thunder's design.
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