Toothless is a beloved character in How To Train Your Dragon, but almost didn’t look like Toothless in the new live-action movie.
The latest adaptation of the hit animated movie was just released in theaters on Friday (June 13), but director Dean DeBlois reveals the dragon nearly looked different in live-action.
Keep reading to find out more…
“We went too far a couple of times in exploring where Toothless could have come from,” Dean told Discussing Film about the photorealism of the dragon. “We received some advice from John Dykstra. He’s a legendary visual effects person from ILM, and he was consulting with Universal at the time. He said to think backwards, like if the animated movie is a stylized and exaggerated version of these creatures, then what did they look like in real life? It was a great philosophy to adopt as the designers at Framestore started to explore the other dragons.”
Dean added that they could take some creative freedom with the other dragons, but Toothless needed to look just like Toothless.
“We could depart from some of the cartoonish designs with the other dragons. But with Toothless, in particular, he’s so iconic and so expressive,” the filmmaker shared. “He’s already quite specific that as we tried to change his face and maybe make his mouth or eyes smaller, or shift proportions around, he stopped feeling like the character very quickly.”
“So, we decided to retain the Stitch-like proportions of the eyes to the nose to the mouth, but then work on his body and make it feel convincing and realistic in terms of his skeleton, musculature, and iridescent scales. We really wanted to lean into his black panther animal reference,” he continued.
Speaking of Stitch, if you didn’t know, Dean also co-wrote and co-directed the original animated Lilo & Stitch.
How To Train Your Dragon is now in theaters (and it’s a must see!) – Find out if there’s an end credits scene, and meet the live-action cast!
