How to Train Your Dragon is looking to be one of the biggest summer releases of the year, despite at least one entirely bizarre world-building choice that is representative of what will bring down the movie overall. Early reviews for 2025’s How to Train Your Dragon are generally favorable, praising the movie’s depiction of the beloved, heartfelt story. However, reviewers have also noted that the biggest point against it is being a nearly beat-for-beat remake, calling into question its necessity.
The first How to Train Your Dragon movie is just 15 years old, while the final installment in the acclaimed animated trilogy only came out in 2019. As the live-action remake trend at Disney runs out of classics and starts to move into movies from the 2000s and 2010s, people may be worried about the lasting legacy of their favorites. In the case of How to Train Your Dragon, the animation helps the movie balance a certain goofiness with its emotional, grandiose, and important story. One element in particular that didn’t even totally work in the original is apparently making it into the remake.
In HTTYD, All Berk’s Adult Vikings Have Scottish Accents, While Their Kids Sound American
This Was Probably Based Around The Casting Of The Adults
In the first movie, the only substantial adult characters are Stoick and Gobber, voiced by Gerard Butler and Craig Ferguson, both Scottish actors who used their real accents in the roles. The limited spoken lines from the rest of the older generation of Vikings reveal that the filmmakers decided to match these two lead actors, as the rest of the adults also have Scottish accents — even though the Vikings are Scandinavian (modern-day Denmark, Norway, and Sweden). However, Hiccup and Astrid and their peers all sound (North) American, this group being led by Canadian actor Jay Baruchel and American actor America Ferrera.
This is completely nonsensical world-building; while children might, in different circumstances, adopt different accents from their parents, Berk appears to be a fairly isolated population, where the kids would only interact with the older generation who sound Scottish. When How to Train Your Dragon has some more wacky elements overall, from the exaggerated dragon designs to the kids’ ridiculous names to scare off trolls, this choice was easier to accept on the basis of not making the work more difficult for some fan-favorite actors.
The Accents Are Indicative Of What Will Be 2025’s How To Train Your Dragon’s Biggest Weakness
HTTYD’s Trailers Make It Clear A Lot Of This Will Be Exactly The Same
However, the new How to Train Your Dragon seems to take itself a bit more seriously, which may be its downfall when it comes to the issue the accents are representative of. You can tell a serious story through animation or a silly story through live-action. However, 2025’s How to Train Your Dragon‘s darker tone shows what route they are going down — and yet, again probably driven by the casting choice of bringing back Gerard Butler, the kids all appear to have entirely different accents from their parents.
The trailers have only really shown Stoick to confirm his accent, but one would ᴀssume his speech being different from Hiccup’s (Mason Thames) means that the same logic would hold throughout Berk’s population. The new How to Train Your Dragon is adjusting its atmosphere because the filmmakers clearly want it to be more serious, yet they are, at the same time, so attached to being a faithful remake that they are adapting many aspects of it without change. And this approach, both through making the new movie seem pointless and resulting in some tonal dissonance, will be its fatal flaw.
