Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of How to Train Your Dragon
2010 · Chris Sanders · How to Train Your Dragon on Sightlines
A boy stands over a pinned dragon with a knife, and his arm doesn't come down.
Everything the film knows is in that stall. Hiccup has spent an entire act trying to become what his village requires: a body that sees a dragon and kills it, with no gap between the seeing and the killing. He finally gets his chance. The animal is down, bound, waiting. The arm won't move. He looks; the dragon looks back; he cuts it loose and runs, and the movie he was in ends right there.
Gilles Deleuze had a name for the machinery Hiccup just broke. He called it the sensory-motor schema: the trained link between perceiving a situation and acting to change it, the circuit nearly all popular cinema runs on. See a problem, do something, the problem resolves. Images built that way he called the movement-image, and Berk is made of nothing else. The village is a machine for installing that reflex in children, and Hiccup is its one defective unit. When the link fails, Deleuze calls it the crisis of the action-image — a character who can no longer respond adequately to what he perceives. In postwar Europe that usually arrived as despair. Here it arrives as mercy, in a runt who isn't strong enough to be cruel, and the title turns out to mean its opposite. This is a film about untraining a reflex a whole culture spent generations installing.
When the circuit breaks, Deleuze says, you get a seer: someone who can only watch and listen, because no available action fits what's in front of him. Deleuze's examples are adults wandering bombed-out cities. The cove sequence gives you one in a DreamWorks cartoon. A boy and a wounded animal in a bowl of rock, mostly wordless, circling each other while the plot goes precisely nowhere. Those are what he calls pure optical and sound situations, and the long nothing-happening stretch is what he calls temps mort, dead time, where the everyday is simply held and the story waits. Putting one of those at the load-bearing centre of a family blockbuster is DeBlois and Sanders's real invention. It is also the part everyone remembers.
The debt is exact. Carroll Ballard and Caleb Deschanel got there first with the beach in The Black Stallion, a boy and a horse assembling trust out of gesture, glance and firelight without a line of dialogue. Moving that into animation is harder than it sounds, because a drawn animal has no involuntary life to catch. Everything Toothless does had to be chosen.
So they built him out of other animals: part cat, part salamander, part fighter jet. He speaks in ear-flicks, in the set of his shoulders, and above all in his pupils. Deleuze separates a face holding one steady quality from a face crossed by small movements building toward a threshold, and the second he calls a potisign, an icon of power, a face in the act of becoming. That's the black slit widening into a full round eye. Nothing has happened yet. Something is about to. The method is Miyazaki's: Totoro carries an entire interior with zero speech, and Toothless inherits that grammar of a body expressing itself in postures rather than acts, which is what Deleuze meant by a cinema of the body. Watch the two of them mirror attitudes in the cove. A hand held out with the face turned away is the precise inverse of the Viking posture, axe up, eyes forward. Deleuze would call that a gest: a bodily attitude that exposes a whole social relation without arguing it.
Roger Deakins came on as visual consultant, and what he brought was fog, firelight and shadow handled with live-action discipline. Watch the same creature under two lighting schemes. In the night raid Toothless is a shadow with two lit eyes, a shape in smoke, terrifying because unseeable. In the cove, lit from below by a small fire, he's a cat. Same model, same design, different gradient. That is the light-and-shadow charge Deleuze traced back to the expressionists, where things take on a non-organic life depending on how they are lit. André Bazin thought cinema's authority came from the camera's mechanical contact with a real world, which is the one claim a drawn film can never make. So this one borrows the discipline instead, and uses it to argue something no character says aloud: a monster is partly a lighting decision, and Berk has been lighting its world wrong for as long as anyone can remember.
Then it flies, and something genuinely odd for the genre happens. The hero stops acting. Arms out, body still, steering surrendered, while sea stacks and cloud and the turning sheet of the ocean pour past him. Deleuze has a name for this reversal too: the movement of world, where the character goes still and the world takes over the moving, the way a dance absorbs the dancer. The action circuit doesn't come back here. Something replaces it, a body carried instead of a body deciding. John Powell's score isn't accompanying that; it's the medium the flight travels through, the Celtic line under those shots doing structural work rather than decorative. And perception itself comes unmoored up there, riding currents with nothing fixed to organise around, which is Deleuze's reume, a flowing, unanchored looking. The aerial grammar is Miyazaki's again. Nausicaä staged flight as weightless ballet instead of combat. What's added belongs to this film alone: Toothless can only fly because the boy built him a tail fin to replace the one he shot off. The wound is in the machine. Two damaged creatures make one working flier.
Around all of it sits an argument about weapons, assembled from good parents. E.T. supplies the architecture, a child hiding a feared creature from a militarised adult world, shot from kid height so the monster reads tender. The Iron Giant supplies the engine, Brad Bird's "it is not a weapon," with the indictment landing on the adults who could only see a threat. And Sanders quotes himself, running the Lilo & Stitch template through Norse fog, the rounded teardrop-and-curve line that turns a killing machine into something you want to hold.
What it did to narrative is the wounding. The boy who shot a dragon out of the sky ends the film short a leg, matching the fin he took. A mass-market children's film that lets its hero be permanently maimed by his own first act of violence has decided that consequences are real, which is why the trilogy DeBlois went on to make alone reads as novelistic: bodies don't reset between chapters. The ending also rebuilds the large-form action-image it had broken, with an encompassing situation, a decisive collective act, a transformed world. Only now the village flies. That leaves a good question hanging over everything after it. An army that stopped killing dragons and started riding them is still an army. Did Berk untrain the reflex, or just re-aim it?
Deleuze barely looked at animation. What he did say was that the cartoon belongs almost purely to the movement-image, a drawn line existing only by describing its own motion, with nothing underneath it to endure. How to Train Your Dragon is the counterexample, and it's why DreamWorks stopped being the snarky alternative and became a studio worth arguing with. It found duration. It put two creatures in a bowl of rock, let them look at each other, and trusted a nine-year-old to sit still inside the gap.
Watch it again for the pupils. And watch for the places where the film chooses to stop moving. That's where it's thinking.
Concepts in play
- crisis of the action-image — Hiccup downs the most feared dragon in the archipelago and cannot finish the kill: the trained Viking circuit of see-dragon/kill-dragon fails inside the one body it was installed in, and the film stays in that failure instead of resolving it.
- pure optical and sound situations (opsigns/sonsigns) — The cove taming — trust built through gesture, glance and firelight with no dialogue — leaves boy and dragon with nothing to do but look at and listen to each other.
- the seer (voyant) — Hiccup's role through the middle of the film is to watch a wounded animal he can neither kill, free into the village, nor tell anyone about; his seeing has no action attached to it.
- temps mort (dead time) — The wordless cove sequence, descended from Ballard and Deschanel's dialogue-free beach in The Black Stallion, runs for minutes without advancing the plot — an unbroken stretch of the everyday held open inside a studio blockbuster.
- potisign (icon of power) — Toothless's pupil dilation and ear-flicks: micro-movements crossing a non-speaking face and building toward the threshold of contact, rather than a face holding one settled expression.
- cinema of the body (attitudes and postures) — Toothless communicates character entirely through posture, ear-flicks and pupil dilation with zero speech — the Totoro model of animal charisma without language, where duration is carried by a body's attitudes.
- the gest — The open hand offered with the face turned away, set against the Viking attitude of raised axe and forward stare: two postures that lay bare the social relation the whole village is built on.
- expressionism (light–shadow gradient) — Roger Deakins's consultancy on fog, firelight and shadow: the same creature design reads as an unseeable shape in smoke during the night raid and as a cat in the firelit cove.
- movement of world — The flight sequences, scored to John Powell's soaring Celtic-inflected music, in which Hiccup stops steering and holds still while the archipelago, cloud and sea are carried past him — kinetic joy produced by a body that has stopped acting.
- reume — The gliding aerial camera lifted from Nausicaä's grammar — flight staged as weightless balletic drift rather than combat, perception riding air currents with no fixed centre.
- action-image, large form — The film opens and closes inside the encompassing situation of an island archipelago at war with dragons, where a global threat presses until a decisive collective act transforms it — the circuit broken in the cove and then rebuilt on a new premise, with the village now airborne.