News | We Have Dragons!

August 7, 2019 Editorial, News

The Lion King 2019 Review: Farts Are OK Now, & so is Violent BULLYING!

This 2019 version of “The Lion King” is truly a visually lush and beautiful 3D computer animated movie, that shows us just how amazing traditional 2D hand animated movies can be in comparison. A flawed remake, with some interesting and sometimes disturbing changes, for a new generation of (easier to upset and influence) children and adults.

Most reviews that are currently available for this movie, criticise the limitations of photorealistic 3D animation, in telling a story with talking animals as the main characters.
This review will also touch on the subject of 2D VS. 3D animation, but it’s too easy to leave things at that – it seems that a lot of this movie (the voice acting, music and also story) not only didn’t “evolve” along with the new 3D medium, but also went backwards.
The overall result is a visual feast and marvel, but a total package being less “cohesive” and lower quality, than the smash hit 1994 original of “The Lion King”.
There’s more to it than that though, because other things were changed and added as well – some of those changes having apparently malevolent reasons:

June 19, 2019 News, WeHaveDragons.org Things

This is WeHaveDragons.org!

Ruffnut and Tuffnut arguing, Barf-and-Belch chewing on surveying equipment, on Berk.

Berk wasn’t built in a day, and neither was this new “How to Train Your Dragon” fansite, blog and forum!

Hey there! I’m Beinir (Ben) Madbear: a hairy (hooligan) Web developer and online producer living in Australia, who only saw the first HTTYD movie in August last year.
Soon afterwards, I had decided to start work on this fansite.

It took a while, but now this fansite is ready to show you. (For more detail on why this fansite was made, see the “About” page here.)

Hiccup and Toothless portrait — Hi there! – by Masterrohan

Needless to say, I’ve become quite the HTTYD fan and want to collect and show my favorites of what other fans are sharing with like-minded people.
There are many places to look however, and I rely on other HTTYD fans to keep sending goodies they themselves like: such as news, fanart, fanfiction and other cool things.

If you’ve found or made something really nice, send it my way!
If it becomes one of my favourites, I might add it to one of my future blog posts, or invite you to post it on our HTTYD Community Forum.

I am not going to accept money for third-party ads, nor use affiliate links and I won’t “sell” the fansite or my opinions on anything – this fansite is independent. Making money means “work”, and I want this (fan)site to remain “fun”.

Why not see our friendly Community Forum (logging in will show all its categories), and introduce yourself! Signing up to our forum is the best way to stay in touch with new cool Dragons stuff added on this fansite.

January 6, 2019 Editorial, News

Review of “How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World” – The Hidden Shrek?

Toothless holding up the script to "HTTYD: The Hidden World" and saying "What the hell is this?"

Only a very few minutes of this final HTTYD (The Hidden World) movie, make sense in the context of the entire story up to this point, starting from the first movie in 2010.

Futurama's Fry and HTTYD's Hiccup with attached Brainslugs — Montage. Hiccup, Brain Slug. DreamWorks Animation

Whatever remains, appears to be dedicated towards somehow legitimising unusual personality changes to the Viking and dragon characters.
These personality changes, appeared to have been required in order to push an unusually large amount of modern-day mainstream-media-style themes that simply don’t fit into a “mythical Viking and dragons story from long ago”.
An entire hour of this movie, is spent watching the Dragon Riders either running away like panicked insects and leaving their ancestry, friends, lives and livelihoods behind, or farewelling their dragons.

In the real world, the toxic compromises and concessions the characters of this movie make, would mean the collapse of the society that gives in to them.

The Dragons TV series used to be officially described as the events between the first and the second movie. Unfortunately, the unusual changes in this final movie appear to be so major, that now the TV series was “supposedly” never canon (not part of the official “universe/story”), after all.
Even ignoring the TV series, doesn’t help in explaining the now frequently daft and nonsensical actions made, by this movie’s Berkians.

Editorial, News

Review of “How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World” – The Hidden Shrek? (Bewilderbeast Edition)

Sign above toilet, warning not to flush kitchen rolls, sanitary pads, solid objects, live fish and dragons.

The Hidden Shrek? Or: How to Flush Your Dragon?

Living in Australia, I managed to see the movie when it was first released to theaters here on January 3 2019. One of my first impressions was, that it was made so blatantly clear in the film trailers what the story was about, that there weren’t too many surprises left. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, as anything new that wasn’t revealed in the trailers did keep the story chugging along, and also helped prepare the devoted big and small fans for the so-called “bittersweet ending” that we were told would happen.

At the end of the movie, around a third of the children in the cinema on the day were crying and inconsolable.

Along with the predictably positive professional reviews for this movie, at the time of writing this review (January 5), there are already several glowing moviegoer reviews on the biggest movie reviews and information website.
The reviews were mostly from people with accounts that are apparently many years old, but they had never left a review for any other movie or made any other real contribution to the movie information website. I’m not entirely sure what to make of that, but let’s move on…