How to Train Your Dragon: Homecoming

After The Hidden World, I always wondered how would Hiccup's children reaction to Dragons. A charming yet rushed short, Homecoming answered that question and gives us the HTTYD feels we all love. Highly recommend.

+ Not ten seconds into the short and you get the feeling and nostalgia of the franchise.

+ Animation quality and direction are fantastic, unlike other Dragons shorts. Scenes and shifting are captured very well.

+ Outstanding Music reminiscent to the HTTYD theme, with new tweaks.

+ Hiccup and Astrid are yet again a remarkable duo. Strong writing for both of them.

+ Zephyr and Nightlights' characters are unique well-developed. Definitely the star of the short.

+ Remarkable voice acting for the children. Nuffing's accent!

+ The satisfying amount of content out of 20 minutes we all needed.

• Hiccup's voice acting hasn't been modified to suit his older self. Feels like same young Hiccup.

• Rushed. Could've used more time to develop scenes. We barely saw New Berk or it's traditions, and "three days" seemed like a couple of minutes.

• Missing characters.

🚨 SPOILERS follow 🚨

• Hiccup not emphasizing Gobber's memories for Stoick makes absolutely no sense given Hiccup known love for his father.

• Major characters missing. Most are supposedly 31 years old, why do they look young? Didn't they start families? With Vikings' life span, it makes no sense they're still young, even when Hiccup already has TWO children. Focus was definitely not given to the background.

It's New Berg at Snoogletog. It's ten years since humans and dragons have agreed to live apart. Hiccup and Astrid are shocked when their daughter Zephyr reveals her anti-dragon sentiments after reading her grandfather's old book. Hiccup decides to hold a dragon friendly festival by re-enacting his first contact with Toothless. This is a Christmas special coming after the third How to Train Your Dragon movie. This is a fun under-the-radar franchise and this continues its good works. It hits on a good theme and continues the story onwards.

This is the second Christmas special for the franchise. In my opinion, it's quite inferior to its predecessor from eight years ago, "Gift of the Night Fury." Neither was scripted by Dean DeBlois, the man behind the three movies, but this one was unnecessary and brought nothing new to the story. Worst of all is that there's poor continuity between this and the epilogue of the final movie. The children's reactions are completely different, as was Toothless's. This lack of consistency made it difficult to reconcile this in the same universe. Watch this only if you're a completist superfan of the franchise. Despite enjoying all three movies, most of the specials and some of the TV episodes, I won't be watching it again myself.

"How did it happen?" - Hiccup

Basically that's what you get when people forget about things that were common for you.

On the one hand the Special was great, hilarious in places and homecoming))) but I dunno, I have kinda strange mixed up feelings about it. Seeing Hiccup and Toothless not together is just... it doesn't feel right. Tamed once - tamed forever. And letting dragons go is like throwing your favourite pet cat or dog into the wild. Not only Toothless but also all other dragons that lived on Berk wouldn't be scared of humans and if they meet someone who has never seen dragons....

The story was mainly concentrated on Zephyr and yet again as in Hiccup's case, she changed her mind when she actually saw Toothless and understood that he wasn't a thread. Well, maybe not exactly the same case, but the idea is the same: seeing and understanding that the thing is not quite what you think of it to be.

So I don't think that without dragons Berkians would be able to preserve that love and care that hey had when dragons lived with them. Slowly in a couple of generations everything would return to the beginning when people were terrified of dragons and hunted them.

I didn't pay attention when I got this movie to view, we had enjoyed the various "HTTYD" movies and expected this one to be another one. Nope! It is a 22 minute short, I suppose a holiday special. While it has its own charm I can't really compare it to a feature length movie. Even the animation detail seems inferior, although that just might be an impression. Overall I'd say watch it if it comes on free TV but don't pay to see it, not good enough.

My wife and I watched it at home on DVD from our public library. So it was free.