Growing Up with a franchise/star

[BK007]

With the news that How to Train Your Dragon 3 had been delayed yet another year back to 2018, a whole 2 years since it's first premature stakeout of a summer 2016 date, it now means that the franchise would have spanned 8 years from the first instalment of boy and dragon back in the spring of 2010.

 

Whilst this is no Potter, and a couple of us have surely wrote odes and memoirs about that odyssey over the years, it is still stark in its similarities and differences to other franchises. These days, it's all about quick turnaround, get one out after the other. Any crowdpleasing movie that makes bank has Hollywood frothing at its teeth for another sequel and the hundreds of millions that follows. Whether a sequel is good or bad does not matter for this perspective, either way they are churned out within 2-3 years. Strike the iron while its still hot is the mentality that pervades, after all, with this generation's increasingly short attention spans, the industry had to change to accomodate.

 

So, it is this very aspect that makes How to Train Your Dragon and its storytellers rather unique. Already an animated movie takes a fortitude of patience to complete with production on average running 4 years long, as opposed to months for live action titles. Second, its unfair reputation as a kids medium makes any sequel simply follow the blockbuster route of more, more and MORE of whatever that made the first one good, whether this be funny characters, explosive setpieces or a star-studded voice cast. Following Toy Story's footsteps, Dreamworks' DeBlois decided to age up his film characters from the first instalment, but different to that movie is that it is a "current" franchise. What I mean by this, is that, this was never a dormant franchise that its producers decided to come back for one more (Toy Story/Indiana Jones/Star Wars) or reboot (Jason Bourne, Jurassic Park, Spider Man), the fact is when this franchise wraps up in 2018, it will have been one of the longest running franchises ever with the same set of characters, so no prequels or spin-offs either. Why does this mean something? Or, if to no one else, to me.

 

Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, the Hobbit, Twilight, the Hunger Games etc are all franchises based on books with releases planned for multiple years and being executed as such, however unlike Harry Potter and possibly How to Train Your Dragon, the length of time between movies was a year and the length of time in the movie's universe sometimes even less time. The age of the characters remains the same or, the actors and actresses involved are old enough that negligible change is detected. Some of them are on one journey and thus should look the same. There is no growing up with the character. 

 

Harry Potter has been the only franchise in which age does play an important role and thus the characters we see grow up on the screen. In How to Train Your Dragon, there are no actors but simply animated characters, so that impact is slightly dampened, but is otherwise still present where it simply does not exist in other franchises. This franchise, is one that also is prioritizing quality over returning to the well, and it is its story that leads me to invest in the world and thus feel the characters grow up. If Hiccup is aged for the finale, and I don't see why not, we would have basically accompanied him growing up on screen, his journey from a boy to a man, and whilst this is a popular theme recurrent in movies, we normally see a character change in 2 hours on the screen whilst all we've done is relaxed our body stuffing it with popcorn in reality.

 

After the credits roll come June 2018, I would be 8 years and 3 months older than when I first started this journey with Hiccup and Toothless, and they too, would reflect that time. Perhaps not for all those that abandoned the franchise over the last 4 years, but those that are passionate and have remained with our teenage Viking, will probably or should probably feel that time invested over 8 years. You, or rather, I am thinking back of how I was in March of 2010 and the instance in which I saw the film and how I saw the sequel this past year. Where will I be for the finale? We know it's coming in 4 years. It's not an if, it's a when and that when is as long as some franchises take in total. 

 

To me, this thought process, has reminded me of how important our lives are. We, passionate film and box office aficionados, congregate on this site and discuss daily or weekly in movie threads of which we care about and anticipate. We share the latest news, castings, photos, trailers and its box office run until it is done and then we move on to the next and yet all the while, time just keeps on going on. Some of you here are new to the forum, others have been doing this much longer than I have, and of course, all of us were watching movies before we were on forums anyway. Rarely has a franchise started with the intention of ending a story and completing an arc in a couple movies time. That's what they all want to do, but of course they have had to get through the first movie first, and here with the Dragon franchise, we have one that has gone through puberty with #2 pretty well, and has maturity in its sights without having to fabricate more to the tale, as original films do, or having a strict structural journey that most otherwise limits how the story is told from a film perspective. 

 

When those of us who remain with the franchise or perhaps check back in 2018 after an absence how Dragon 3 fared at the box office, we will, if not already realizing it now, feel that length of time. There will be no more Bella Swans or Katniss Everdeens. There will be an entirely new generation of actors and new franchises and inevitably rebooted franchises with different actors but Hiccup and Toothless will be 8 years older. There isn't a Shrek, Dory or Gru-like revisiting. These characters will have experienced time like we have and that is something special. In a Potter-esque way, where the characters are never gone long enough for you to stop caring, and they aren't the same when they do return, the How to Train Your Dragon franchise could be another trilogy for the ages for its fans turning its length into a strength of reflection that others are unable to seize. 

 

This post was not to talk about its box office, but more of a general piece about time and movies. We do go for entertainment, so it's not like any of us would really be clamouring for time acknowledgement between Pirates of the Caribbean, Batman or Star Wars movies in addition to the fact that none of these franchises and most others, have their theme be coming-of-age, but that's a central theme in How to Train Your Dragon and whether by choice or the forced hand of the markets, the way the trilogy will be released has turned into another Potter generation for me. Potter dominated my childhood and teenage years with its 10 year resume and unbeknownst to myself going into the darkened theatre in 2010, Dragon would be an everpresent highlight during my 20s. 

 

Do any of you feel the same way about either Harry Potter or How to Train Your Dragon, or have your own anecdotes? I added stars to the title too, because, for those who are older than I am, you might have seen some of their favourite actors and actresses change during their tenure in the industry and how their roles, or their movies (in the case of directors) follow a trajectory of life and how you related to it.

 

Thank you for reading, if you have, I didn't know when I started I would go on as I have but would love to read about others and their experiences. 

 

[Ezen Baklattan]

Good read, BK007. 

 

Toy Story and Monsters Inc. also pulled it off to some extent. Around 10-12 years after those movies touched down and touched the hearts of kids everywhere, they would see themselves again in a message of growing older, just like Andy, Mike, and Sulley as they take on their college adventures in Toy Story 3 and Monsters University. I really appreciate how time can truly help franchises blossom. Hell, we've seen it done with an entire feature film just last year.

 

This kind of change doesn't even happen on TV shows an awful lot. The Simpsons, Spongebob, Family Guy, South Park, they've been running for over 15 years each and have never really changed. The fact that it's movies that are some of the first big ones to take on the turn of time is really interesting.

[TServo2049]

Very interesting topic. Even when kid characters are allowed to age in real time and are not recast (Honey, I Blew Up the Kid, the Santa Clause sequels) that generally isn't a major element of the series.

Toy Story is an excellent example where it is, even with the 11-year gap between 2 and 3. I was just the right age to have basically grown up with Andy. We all remember the stories of twentysomethings driven to tears...that is, those of us who weren't among them.

But I agree, How to Train Your Dragon is very interesting in this regard. Dean DeBlois purposely wanted to age the characters even though he didn't have to (all of the cast members were already in their 20s when they did the first movie). And the time passage in real life ended up roughly in sync because of the time to make them.

Animation has so much leeway to keep the timeline static, so it's good when the opportunity is actually seized to follow the passage of time in sync or relatively close to that in real life. Even if the child actors do age, they don't always age the characters. (I can think of several animated film series/TV shows where the same actor was voicing the same character who stayed the same age, but they were clearly going into puberty in real life.)

Despicable Me 2 could have done more with this - you could hear the child/teen actresses got older but there was no real change to their character other than a clichéd puppy love angle for the oldest one, that honestly went nowhere. With part 3 it will be unavoidable because the middle girl will probably be well into puberty, and the youngest one will be too old to be the cute precocious character she was before. But what they'll do with it, I have no idea.

Edited January 24, 2015 by TServo2049