Daily Dialogue — June 8, 2015

Opening VO

HICCUP: This…is Berk. It’s twelve days north of hopeless and a few degrees south of freezing to death. It’s located solidly on the meridian of misery. My village. In a word: sturdy. It’s been here for seven generations but every single building is new. We have fishing, hunting, and a charming view of the sunsets. The only problems are the pests. You see, most places have mice, or mosquitoes. We have–dragons.

Closing VO

HICCUP: This…is Berk. It snows nine months of the year, and hails the other three. Any food that grows here is tough and tasteless. The people that grow here are even more so. The only upsides are the pets. While other places have ponies or parrots, we have–dragons.

— How to Train Your Dragon (2010), screenplay by William Davies, Dean DeBlois, Chris Sanders, book by Cressida Cowell

The Daily Dialogue theme for the week: Voice-Over Narration. Today’s suggestion by Will King.

Trivia: In the book of ‘How to Train Your Dragon’, Hiccup doesn’t have a love interest. Furthermore, Toothless the dragon in the book is about the size of the Terrible Terror breed, and he is also green and red, not black. Toothless also got his name because when Hiccup first found him he had no teeth. He grew one tooth, only to lose it shortly later. The producers decided, with the approval of author Cressida Cowell, that it would be more cinematic to make Toothless large enough to be ridden as a flying mount. As such, Toothless was completely redesigned as a rare Night Fury, a highly intelligent breed of dragon evolved for speed and stealth. His personal name in the film derives from Hiccup’s observation about how his teeth are normally retracted into his jaws so they don’t interfere with his fire breathing, which is typically projected as an explosive pulse.

Dialogue On Dialogue: Commentary by Will: “The voice overs in this film serve to not only to complete the circle from the end back to the beginning, but to illustrate the shift in thinking of all the characters. When the film begins, the people see dragons as their enemy (“pests” in the opening monologue). The closing monologue serves to clinch the shift by using the word “pets” to show that what were once enemies are now colleagues.”