How to train your dragon

Once upon a time in the movie industry, boy met girl, lost her, met her again, and rode off into the sunset and end credits with her, unless he was a very lonesome cowboy. Nowadays, in the wonderful new era of CGI animation, boy meets a lovably ugly creature, rides it into a 3D sequel, and collects a girl on the way.

Sometimes, role reversal is allowed. A princess meets Shrek and a hula girl encounters Stich. Dreamworks and Disney, respectively, made them and specialise in sentimental tales with a higher saccharine level than pioneering Pixar, which mastered the higher art of drawing many levels into cartoon craftsmanship. It blends slightly bitter molasses, adult-friendly wit and child-unfriendly pensive spells in its products.

Dreamworks is showing new signs of trying to catch up with Pixar's multi-dimensional leadership. That's a damnation with faint praise. In my cineplex viewing of the dragon movie, children sometimes yawned and stretched their arms in imitation of what they see Daddy do every time they force him to watch Teletubbies with them. These reactions usually accompanied scenes where the nerdish Viking boy-hero and his very macho girlfriend are surrounded by gorgeously coloured skyscapes, marine scenery and jungle settings.

Much of How To Train Your Dragon looks like a trial run for Avatar. With a weaker plot and characterisations. This time, the destructive baddies are not bad, because the variety of dragons and their Viking enemies are actually all good guys, and all the adorably same inside except for a mega-dragon who lives in a secret island. Our young American-voiced nerd is, naturally, a latent pacifist who discovers uncanny abilities to befriend and train all dragons.

His dad is the burly blustery Viking chieftain, who will learn to love his misfit son, of course. The boy's best pal will be a wounded dragon, Toothless, for whom he will craft a tail wing. If thick-lipped Toothless reminds you of Stich, you'll realise they had the same two creative directors.

The audience's salvation, and it warrants big thanks to Dreamworks, is the inability of the dragons to speak any languages other than grunts of empathy and love. This lack of vocal unreality better enables adults to smile at the antics of the cutely ugly flying monsters. Aaaahh! So, it would be churlish to chastise Dreamworks for not providing an end-credits warning for potential visitors to Indonesia's isles of Komodo dragons.

But credits must go where they were designed to be rewarded by Oscar voters next spring. As animations go, Dreamworks has created a delightful tour de force of rich colour schemes, and dazzling images of water and fire, reflections and shadows, clouds and underwater scenes, smoke and emotive eyes. They have been the staples of animators' exhibitionism since Disney's first full-length feature.

CGI and 3D can showcase those traditional benchmarks well, and do this time round. The only obvious laggard in the Dreamworks' stable is the waving in the wind of individual hairs and fur. One other cost-cutting pointer is the movie's voices. Relative unknowns, several (including Craig Ferguson) seem to be real Scottish stand-ins for Scot-accented versions of Mike Myers or Robbie Coltrane pretending to be burly Vikings. One presumes that Scandinavian accents would be even less understood than Scottish ones in Peoria.