A consideration of Dragons

Yeah, I missed my Monday/Tuesday target update, partly because I had company over, but mostly because the post I've been working on keeps getting overtaken by events before I can publish it. I've got a 3-day weekend coming up, so hopefully I'll get it off then. In the meantime, I want to talk about dragons, and specifically, how to train them.

3D optional

Having not seen How to Train Your Dragon when it first came out in 2010, I saw it for the first time this weekend preparatory to being taken to the second one, and since then, I have been holy cow geeking out about these movies in a way I haven't about any work of fiction in years. Maybe not since I first read the Dresden Files, coming up on 3 years ago, or perhaps even further back to when I saw Wall-E in theaters. Or maybe even further. I don't think the HTTYD movies are as revolutionary as Wall-E was - in fact, there's a lengthy sequence in the first one that I suspect owes a lot to the kind of dialogue-free storytelling pioneered in that movie - but despite my ongoing and unabashed adoration for Wall-E, I'm forced to seriously consider whether these might be better.

There are a lot of reasons these movies hit me so hard (chief among them, perhaps, that this is probably as close as I'll ever get to a worthy Dragonriders of Pern movie) (although IMDB does have a page in development ...). What is most striking to me, though, is all the lessons I'm learning about storytelling through music and multimedia, in ways that go far beyond my usual preferred medium of print.

(Spoilers beyond this point. While Dreamworks is hardly throwing in Sanderson-level plot twisters, it's still best not to read on unless you've seen them.)

(No, seriously, I mean it. **SPOILERS**)

The soundtrack to these movies is fantastic. John Powell is a God among men, and for the last few days my never-ending project at work to listen to and approve/reject all the music in my Google Play account has been put on hold while I listen to the two soundtracks on shuffle at levels possibly deleterious to my hearing. But the reason I'm listening to this same music over and over is not because it's outstanding music (although it is), or even just because of the associations it has with the movie (although there's a reason most of my favorite music is from a soundtrack to a movie or game; I learned years ago that I don't so much like classical music as I like classical-sounding music associated with stories that matter to me). No; instead, I'm listening to the music because the more I listen, the more I learn about the story. I've heard people say music is a universal language, and I've never really bought into it, because while music is certainly able to convey emotions, it's not granular enough to convey specific causes and effects. And that's still the case here. However, because the music is associated with the rest of the audiovisual experience of the films, the various themes become more than emotions; they become particular ideas or themes or characters, and by using them in various combinations and associations, Powell is telling a level of story above and beyond what's happening on the screen. This isn't by means a new invention, but it's definitely the first time the music of a soundtrack has actually changed (rather than simply strengthened or enhanced) my experience of a story. (Edit 7/6: Not true, see update near the end) Here are a few examples of what I mean.

(Following paragraphs will give specific timestamps from these two videos)

Perhaps my single favorite theme in the score is what I call the 'flight theme'. I'm pretty sure the first time it's used in full is in the track 'Test Drive' (starting at 30:20 in the first video; the actual flight theme starts at 30:58). It plays as, for the first time, the young hero Hiccup and his dragon, Toothless, learn to fly together using the prosthetic tailfin they've rigged up, swooping over the surf and around the rocky pillars of the nordic-esque coast. The instrumentation generally starts with French Horn, as heard at 30:58, and builds to soaring strings, or else just skips straight to the full brass section, and every time it plays, Hiccup and Toothless are flying and swooping and soaring and doing all the things that made moviegoers pay extra to see this in 3D.

 ... except, not quite always. Take a listen to the same video at 1:02:04. It's the same theme, but slower, quieter, in solo piano. What's up with that? It's not flying. What happens here is (did you not hear me? SPOILERS!!!!) Hiccup, awoken after the final battle, pulls back the covers on his recovery bed to see that he has, in fact, lost one of his legs at mid-shin and been fitted with a prosthetic. The flight theme - quietly, almost sadly, bittersweet - is what plays as he takes his first stumbling steps of relearning to walk. Which is heartbreaking. When I made that connection, listening to it at work, I sent my sister a message saying that it was not at all convenient for me to be tearing up while editing pages of Central Wisconsin Sunday. By tying Hiccup's moment of loss and trepidation and determination back to the rush of sheer release and freedom that they experienced flying together, Powell is telling a whole other level of story - about the loss that Toothless felt when his tail was mangled, the joy he felt when he was able to fly again, and that the courage it took Hiccup and Toothless to hurl themselves into the sky hundreds of feet above the rocky surf using still-suspect hardware is, sometimes, the same courage it takes to get out of bed. A lot of stories, especially animated movies, are about overcoming your struggles, but I've never encountered a story that so viscerally put me through the feelings of someone facing a permanent, irreversable disability like this. Bravo indeed to Powell and Dreamworks.

A journey of a thousand miles ...

***

Another bit that sticks out is what I call the 'viking theme'. You've already heard it in the bagpipe bit at the beginning of Test Drive, two paragraphs up; it sort of acts as glue, transitioning and underlying and sticking together different themes throughout the entirety of both scores. It's the basis for the menu music on the DVD. While not necessarily a fully fledged main theme for the franchise in itself - it's basically two 4/4 measures repeated over and over - it's a great rhythmic, patterned base for the composer to riff on, and he does. But I don't just call it the viking theme because of frequency; he uses the same basic notes in several very different arrangements in the score. Of particular note is the first scene where Hiccup - striving so desperately to prove himself as a viking warrior - encounters the dragon Toothless, shot down by his own hand during an attack on his village; his ancestral enemy; his key to proving himself to his father, to his crush, to his people; and lying helpless on the ground in front of him. You can feel his resolution, both in his animation and in the music that kicks in around 8:50 of the first soundtrack; stirring, martial, fearless. But then listen to the music build, getting bigger and bigger and higher and more and more minor as he raises his knife until 9:18, when the notes fall into a very familiar arrangement - the viking theme, set in minor. Because this is what it is to be a viking; it's not just swigging ale and brawny thews and comical horned hats. It is violence and killing and, very nearly, murder. And in using his ubiquitous theme of all things viking at this critical moment, Powell makes the pressure on Hiccup to become this thing he loves and yet, more and more, fears, so much more real to the viewer.

The price of vikingdom is steep, and there are no refunds.

This same minor theme is reused several times, including in a modified form as a theme for the coming of Drago, the villain of the second movie, which says interesting things about his largely undisclosed past. Movie 3 should be most interesting ...

***

A final example shows how he's doing the same thing across the two movies. Another of those show-stopper 3D moments in the first movie comes when Toothless takes Hiccup and his thoroughly hostile and eminently competent teenybopper crush Astrid for a flight. At first he gives them a wild acrobatics show, but once he's taken Astrid down a notch, he settles into a dramatically smoother flight through the sunset clouds and moonlit heavens, accompanied by a track fittingly called Romantic Flight, starting at 35:33 in the first video. Listen to it, and particularly to the bit starting at the crescendo in 36:24. Sound familiar? It's another variation on the viking theme, this time sticking to major keys but mixing up the rhythm, tempo and instrumentation to make it part of what I call the romantic theme, although perhaps companionship theme would be better; it also appears during 'Forbidden Friendship,' which plays while Hiccup is winning the trust of Toothless for the first time. But it makes one other appearance that, when I caught it while listening to the soundtrack at work, made me get up and take a short walk around the hallway, go to the restroom, before I resumed work.

In the second movie (final spoiler alert, although this one was disclosed in trailers for the movie, so idk why I bother), Hiccup meets his long-thought-dead mother, and shortly later, his father, Stoick, encounters her too. Being Gerard Butler, and therefore a gentleman, he proceeds to fall straight back in love with her and, with one line, heal much of the guilt and recrimination that Valka has felt for 20 years about leaving her husband and child. Like a boss.

Like. A. Boss.

But soon after, in what may be the most adorable scene in animated filmdom since Wall-E got his clamp stuck under comatose EVE's hand-thing, he proceeds to woo her to return to Berk with him by singing what would seem to be their marriage/proposal song, which forms the root of their theme (and which also plays, in soft vocals and wailing bagpipe, at his funeral not long thereafter, which ... God damn, all the feels). Said theme plays softly from the start of the scene, around 35:24 (the name of the track is For the Dancing and the Dreaming); listen until the actually singing starts, and in particular to the soft harp part that plays starting at 35:59. There it is again; romantic theme returns.

Now, you might say, no big deal; it's a romantic moment, they play the romance theme. What gives? And I'd say you were right, if Powell made that theme the basis for his Valka/Stoick reunion theme. But he doesn't. He sneaks it in almost unnoticed, to the point that I didn't even catch it until my fourth or fifth playthrough of the track. Why?

The answer, or at least the reason why this one hit me so hard, is that the romance, and the characterization, of Valka and Stoick is overall very different from the teenage love shared by Astrid and Hiccup in the first movie (and which in the second has matured into a more complex and comfortable companionship that I loved even as I wished for it to get more screen time.) Valka and Stoick are parents, and like all parents, it's hard to picture them ever head-over-heels in young love. The affection they share in their first scene together is, if anything stronger - tender, precious, like nobody else existed in the world - but it isn't the same kind of bouncy, exciteable passion that protagonists usually get to experience. They're both well into adulthood, with the weight of responsibilities to dragon and clan, and it's telling that the first scene where we see them after their reunion is a domestic scene around a cookfire where they joke about Valka's cooking. They're adults. That silly stuff is long behind them.

And yet ...

One of the most important discoveries for any burgeoning adult to make is that their parents are people too, with all the flaws and regrets and joys and quirks that people are prone to. We see our parents going about their domestic lives for so long, stretching back to literally our earliest memories, that it takes many years to realize that parents can feel love - passion, even - just like anyone else. And that even after so many years - years together or apart - parents can still feel a flicker of that magical togetherness of teenage love. That's what that little harp solo means. With one instrument, just a couple measures, Powell completely retells the story of Stoick and Valka and makes their subsequent song and dance together more powerful by at least an order of magnitude, as we see a crack in the stoic (I see what you did there, Dreamworks/Cressida Cowell) demeanors of both Hiccup's parents and the lovestruck inner teenager that never quite died shines out once again.

If the dance continues forever, what comes next for them can never happen, right?

***

There's no question but that John Powell wrote an outstanding score for these movies, or that he and the team at Dreamworks have an artist's vision of how to tell stories through picture, word and, yes, music. But I'm not going to assume that this is any kind of unprecedented, or even that Powell is necessary among the best at this kind of storytelling. It makes me wonder how many other soundtracks would yield this sort of fruit, were I to listen to them so intensively and in such close mental proximity to the movie/game cutscene/whatever other media they originally accompanied. Final Fantasy X, which remains probably my favorite story in all video games, springs to mind. Like the vast majority of soundtracks, it has themes specifically associated with certain people or places (usually helpfully labeled in the track listing), and like the majority, it remixes many of them multiple times throughout the game as the same characters face different emotional states and the same places are viewed through different emotional lenses (To Zanarkand/A Fleeting Dream, I'm looking at you.) Thinking back to it, I wonder if there are places like those I've described above, where one theme is used in a way that's not immediately obvious to tell a completely different story - that I would notice if I gave it a closer look. There are others, I'm sure. This is the kind of specific textual (or audiovisual, as the media dictates) detail that only appears under very close examination, and it's been years - in fact, probably from a time when I had a much less developed sense of storytelling a thematics than I do now - since I subjected any one work to this much scrutiny (aside from maybe Mass Effect, which, for all its sterling qualities, really doesn't approach this level of sophistication, and the Dresden Files, which has some hella intricate writing but is resolutely monomedia in its presentation).

(Edit 7/6: I realized that I already know at least one soundtrack that does this; Les Miserables. In particular, while the duality of JVJ and Javert is definitely present in the book, it never comes across as Hugo's primary theme or goal to use that duality to tell his story. That's not to say it was an accident; Hugo just had other stuff going on. But when the musical was written, by reusing themes and even specific lines (in particular, the passages that start 'What have I done/Who is this man'), they make that duality front-and-center the heart of their story and absolutely inescapable to the audience, which is part of why I love that show so much; it's clever on top of being heartwarming/breaking and epic and all that other good stuff. I'm sure there are others, but at least that's two.)

So, yeah. John Powell, Dreamworks and HTTYD 1&2 have quite blown me away through the intricacy of the story they tell through the soundtrack (and a great many other reasons. If for some godforsaken reason you read this far in spite of the spoiler warnings without having seen them, let your expiation commence at once and go watch them for yourself.) And while I have no idea if this was interesting to anyone but myself, even presupposing that they've seen the movies, it's certainly been on my mind a lot today, and as always, writing it out has helped me better understand exactly what it is that I find so interesting here.

In any case, hope you've enjoyed this belated midweek update. Coming soon: what to do about this charlie-foxtrot in Iraq, and (tangentially related to my current topic), under what circumstances it is acceptable to download copyrighted materials from the interwebs.