For animators, 3-D is a 'Stitch' in time

The last time Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders collaborated on a movie, the wheel had been invented. Electricity was in common use. Indoor plumbing was a feature in most American homes.

Movie animation, however, was in the relative Dark Ages.

It was 2002.

That year, DeBlois and Sanders' animated adventure "Lilo & Stitch," the story of a Hawaiian girl and her obstreperous alien-fugitive pet, was released to a $146 million run at the box office, several direct-to-video features and a TV show. It was a franchise. But despite its quasi-viral success, "it was traditional animation," DeBlois said, "one of the last to be done by a major studio. And I think everybody, this time, was a little intimidated by the format of 3-D."

You wouldn't know it from the results: "How to Train Your Dragon," the new, 3-D collaboration by DeBlois and Sanders that opens today, marries the timeless qualities of fairy tales and adolescent anxiety to "Avatar"-ish aspirations in scope and spectacle. Whether it endears itself to hard-core animation lovers remains to be seen, but the process was not as tough as, say, training a dragon.

"The technology has advanced in a way that's made it very intuitive," DeBlois said. "Animators can translate everything they ever wanted to do on paper through the computer, and can get a level of acting they weren't able to achieve with the drawn line. It's been a great education for Chris - and a total joy - because there are so many new things to conquer."

Much like their hero. Based loosely on the popular book by Cressida Cowell, "How to Train Your Dragon" concerns a civilized young Viking named Hiccup (voiced by Jay Baruchel, of "She's Out of My League") who has a constitutional aversion to his tribe's chief obsession - killing dragons. His father, Stoick the Vast (Gerard Butler), is the fiercest dragon slayer of all, but the far-less-vast Hiccup, try as he might, can't get into it. Even among his peers - who have names like Snotlout (Jonah Hill) and Fishlegs (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) - Hiccup is an outcast, until he meets and tames an injured dragon dubbed Toothless, who possesses characteristics that a lot of audiences will find strangely familiar.

"The animator who took him on had just gotten a cat," DeBlois said. "He didn't realize he was a cat person at the time, but he put many of those attributes into his animation of Toothless. And [DreamWorks animation honcho] Jeff Katzenberg and Chris Sanders and I all have dogs, and so a lot of dog attributes made their way into him. There are even a few horse attributes. So there are a lot of familiar pet qualities to him that make him that much cuter."

Making an ostensible monster cuddly isn't something you need 3-D to do. Where the technology came in handy, Sanders said, was in making the action spectacular. "A good example would be the flying sequences," he said. "We have incredible ability to do these flying sequences in a way that would never be available in 2-D animation. It's one of those things that just shines.

"The interesting thing with 3-D," he added, "is that you have to exercise restraint with your camera. In traditional animation there are limitations, and it's very, very costly to move the camera around.

"But with CG, it's much easier. So one of the things Dean and I were very careful about was not doing anything with the camera that you couldn't do in a live-action film - we didn't want to thread a needle with the camera just because we could."