Image by christianz1969 via FlickrHow to Train Your Dragon, the latest box office success to come out of Dreamworks, is probably the most blatant and chilling example of the indoctrination of America’s youth by the liberal elitist Hollywood since Happy Feet. Only this time, they are not using gay penguins to brainwash our children. No, this time they are using fire-breathing dragons. Or maybe I should say wolves in dragon’s clothing, because we are not really dealing with dragons here. The dragons in this animated feature are actually meant to represent Middle Eastern terrorists, and this film’s overall goal is to convince the young, impressionable minds watching it that they should be sympathetic towards those who would seek to destroy our American way of life.
Now, I know many of you are probably shocked by this accusation. After all, it is just a harmless kid’s film, right? Right, that’s what everyone thought about Pokemon before parents across the country discovered that Pikachu and Squirdle were teaching their children how to gamble and glorifying barbaric animal arena events like dog pits and cockfights.
So, in the interest of saving your children from this psychological intrusion by other malevolent parties, I am going to break the film down here and point out the subversive symbolism. There might be some spoilers here, so if you are concerned that I am going to ruin the ending of a children’s cartoon for you, you probably have bigger emotional problems to deal with.
Take, for example, the film’s opening, which introduces the home country of the film’s leading character Hiccup, the Viking village of Berk. Hiccup’s people are Norse Vikings, and the opening sequence finds them under attack constant attack by dragons. Right off, it is obvious that this Norse village is representative of white Anglo-Saxon America of European origins. I mean, if you want to have a fantasy setting that symbolizes white America, you cannot get any whiter than a Nordic warrior tribe.
This village is under attack by dragons, which are obviously meant to represent Middle Eastern terrorists. Now, you might by saying, hey, that is quite a stretch! What gave you such a far-fetched idea? Let me spell it out for you by pointing to a specific detail during the opening. As these dragons are attacking the village, the most powerful of these dragons, the dreaded Night Fury, which attacks by achieving supersonic speeds and flying into objects in order to destroy them, does so during a spectacular moment during the dragon attack by flying through one of the Viking village’s towers.
Let me repeat that for clarity: he attacks them by flying through their tower, and in an apparent kamikaze attack, otherwise known as a suicide attack. Now, can you think of another moment in our recent history that involved a suicide attacker flying into a tower? Maybe twin towers? This is an obvious allusion to the attacks of September 11, and sets the major groundwork for this film’s attempts to convince the young children watching this film that the terrorists that would do something like that are not bad people, but simply misunderstood creatures.
As they say, It is all downhill from here. The film spends a great deal of time portraying the Viking warriors, who spend all of their time battling the dragons and training their children to battle the dragons, as ignorant paranoid warmongers. Sending their children into battle is a major theme of the movie, as this has been a major argument against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the idea of sending other people’s children into combat. So of course, the film features multiple scenes of children wielding weapons and being thrown into dangerous battle situations, no doubt a scary thought for any parent accompanying their children to the movie theater.
This warmongering Nordic tribe is under constant attack by these strange foreign creatures, which keep blowing up their buildings before disappearing overseas. Does this sound familiar? In addition, these monsters are coming from some mysterious place that the Vikings cannot seem to find, kind of like the nomadic Al-Qaeda tribes that keep moving from one cave to another so they cannot be tracked. It does not take a great leap of faith to make the connection.
But wait, it gets better. The hero of our story, the young pacifist Viking Hiccup, does not think we should by fighting the dragons. No, the dragons are not bad. They are just misunderstood. If we only get to know them better and learn what they like and why they are attacking us, then we can easily convince them not to. This is the philosophy proposed by the film, the whole touchy-feely approach to global conflict involving the diplomatic strategy of talking out our problems rationally with those who seem determined to destroy our homes and cripple our economy by burning fields and stealing livestock (a possible metaphor for oil). This is portrayed as the only rational solution to stopping repeated attacks against a country under direct attack.
There’s a telling bit a dialog, which I believe it’s even in the trailers, when hiccup’s father (the head Viking warrior, of course) finds out about his son’s ludicrous idea of trying to talk rationally with the monsters attacking them with incendiary weapons (WMDs? Weapons of Massive Dragons?). The father yells at the child incredulously that the dragons have killed hundreds of their people, and hiccup rebelliously responds “And we’ve killed thousands of them!” This is an obvious reference to the high death toll exacted by American troops throughout the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and most likely a specific reference to the unfortunate loss of civilian lives at the hands of American soldiers and private war contractors. These accidental deaths are indeed tragic, no one would dare argue otherwise. However, in the logic this film expects our children to buy into, the sad reality of innocent lives being lost in necessary combat situations somehow makes us the unreasonable and more barbaric side in the conflict.
Are you starting to see the lengths that this film is going to in order to brainwash American children against the current war against subversive American-hating terroristgroups? Of course, the children in the film swoop in and save the day in the end, using the dragons (i.e. their new terrorist allies) to defeat the cause of all of this senseless fighting, the big bad dragon forcing all of the other poor dragons to do all of those bad things that have caused us to misunderstand them.
Now, whom does this big bad dragon at the end symbolize? Saddam Hussein? Osama bin Laden? Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? These are all possible candidates, but knowing how the liberal elite in Hollywood think, this monstrous Deus Ex Machina probably symbolizes something more abstract and touchy-feely, like Intolerance or Bad Karma. Whatever it represents, all it takes is its destruction for the Vikings/Americans to live in perfect peace and harmony with the Dragons/Middle Eastern Terrorists. If this sounds like a logical series of events that translates well into the real world, and you are willing to buy into this pacifist make-love-not-war view of global conflicts, than I have a Health Care Plan I would like to sell you. Let’s just hope our future generations adopt this approach to battling the real fire-breathing dragons of the world.
This satirical film review was originally recorded in Episode #15 of the film review podcast MovieSucktastic.
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