“I think when they’re on the ground, we were definitely looking to go even more truthful with that interaction,” the filmmaker explains. “If you’ve ever approached a skittish animal, earning its trust and really feeling that bond happening in pantomime, that was important. We wanted to develop it and indulge it in subtle ways.”
Still, the lessons of E.T. and Spielberg loom large in DeBlois’ mind. In fact, he was mentored by the Beard earlier in his career. Spielberg even provided DeBlois with a fateful note that plays out in both the animated and live-action How to Train Your Dragons: let the dragon Hiccup be the first one to greet Hiccup when awakens at the end of the film to discover he’s lost a foot.
“I credit Steven Spielberg for the tears that we get at the end of our movie, because he was the one who suggested the Toothless be in the room when Hiccup wakes up to discover he’s missing his leg,” DeBlois says before repeating Spielberg’s note: “We’ve been witness to this private relationship throughout the movie. Why not have Toothless in the room like a lap dog waiting for Hiccup to stir awake? And when he does, he could be there for Hiccup’s first steps with his prosthetic leg.” It proved to be a bonding moment for two wounded creatures who could now complete one another. They would make each other whole.
“That’s pure Steven Spielberg right there,” DeBlois smiles.
The idea of influence and legacy looms large over both E.T. and How to Train Your Dragon. Each is about dealing with a parent’s expectations or absence, and both wear their influences on their sleeves (or lips, in the case of E.T. nicking John Wayne’s stolen kiss from The Quiet Man.) And now they both live on for future generations—including at Universal Orlando where How to Train Your Dragon just got its own theme park land in spitting distance of decades-old rides based on Spielberg movies like Jurassic Park and… E.T.
“That’s surreal,” DeBlois says. “We visited that for the first time, and I’m still getting my head around it. What used to be the level of success, at least in the Disney Animation days when I worked there, was an ice show. If you got a Disney on ice show, which we did for Mulan, it meant, ‘Yes, we finally made it!’ But now it’s like a theme park gate. So if you have your movie represented in a major way, a theme park means it really sticks.”
