THE original award-winning “How To Train Your Dragon” (2010) had a charming innocence but I’m always leery of sequels.
Canada-born, Irish-trained animator Dean DeBlois has fallen into the trap of imitation. The result here tells the same story as a plethora of mostly live action films in which the good guys confront a bigger, nastier, better-equipped foe seeking to control the world. It’s been done before and it’s getting stale.
On the icy island of Berk, Stoick (voiced by Gerard Butler with a contorted Scottish accent) benignly rules a Viking community. Stoick’s son Hiccup (Jay Baruchel) and his pet dragon Toothless win regularly at the dragon races. In another kingdom, Valka (Cate Blanchett) cares for sick, injured and orphaned dragons. And further out, Drago (Djimon Hounsou) is buying up dragons and training them to fight.
The film is well supplied with fanciful and generally charming dragons blessed with flight capability. One that isn’t is the Alpha, Drago’s secret weapon, an aerodynamically-impossible behemoth whose appearance suggests that his mama mated with a mastodon.
The attraction of this same-old same-old story-telling soon palled. But small fry easily impressed by brightly-coloured movement and not yet conditioned by grown-up notions of good and evil may well find it acceptable.
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![Teacher Vanessa Jones has been living in Higgins since 2001, and while she loves the area, she says she is “fed up” with the neglectful ACT government.
The Higgins shops have been completely abandoned, says Vanessa, preventing the opportunity for residents to have a community-centred space to socialise.
They only received bins nine months ago, she says, and requests for a water station and repairs to the bus station have gone unanswered.
“It’s very, very slow,” says Vanessa.
“I asked for the zebra crossing on Fullagar [Crescent] to be repainted, and we had to wait about six or nine months.
“That’s just such a long time… we pay a lot of rates.”
Vanessa says assistance from the government only seems to go to communities with time-rich and assertive communities, leaving places such as Higgins, where the majority of households have both adults working full-time and English may not be the first language of the family, at an automatic disadvantage.
“If you’ve got two people working, paying a mortgage, raising two or three kids, they don’t have the time,” says Vanessa.
Vanessa says the lack of attention quieter places such as Higgins is receiving is starting to look a lot like favouritism.
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