THE BLOG: The Time I Wrote an Essay on How to Train Your Dragon 2…and the Director Read It

Welcome to the first installment of the DDP Etc Blog! Here I will have more casual discussions about my personal thoughts on the world of animation as well as some of my memorable experiences with it.

Today I thought I would start with an event that probably stands as one of the best moments of my life – and it actually happened relatively recently, now that I think about it. Last spring, I wrote a term paper for my film class on How to Train Your Dragon 2, which I then published on my tumblr page. To my utter shock, one of the people who read this paper was none other than the film’s director, Dean DeBlois.

I guess it would be helpful to start at the beginning. I first saw How to Train Your Dragon with one of my best friends back in 2010 about a month after it first came out. It was one of the best theatrical experiences I’ve ever had and instantly became one of my favorite movies. The characters, the animation, the music – I was in love, and it was only a matter of time before I bought it on blu-ray.

How to Train Your Dragon 2 had much the same effect on me to nth degree from the moment the first trailer was released. I saw the movie three times while it was in theaters, and I cried every single time. I loved seeing a family movie that had so much depth to it; a movie that respected its audience and didn’t take short-cuts. A movie that I could watch again and again and still find new things to marvel at. A movie that portrayed realistic romantic, platonic, and familial relationships so well.

So with this in mind, I set about writing my term paper for a film history class I took last spring. I wanted to write about the stigma surrounding animated films that said that they couldn’t be taken seriously as a film genre because they were supposedly only for children. I used HTTYD2 as an example of a film that proves that stigma wrong. It was a little hard to do legitimate research given that the movie was less than a year old at the time, but I worked my way around that. I ended up prefacing my examination of the movie with a history of how animation was perceived throughout its history.

During this time, I had joined Tumblr, and I was slowly discovering that I wasn’t the only person that loved these movies. I began to make friends there, and I began to realize that people were actually interested in what I had to say. I decided that once the paper was turned in and graded, I would publish it on my blog. Out of curiosity, I tweeted the film’s director, Dean DeBlois, and let him know what I was up to in April (at this point I was still one month away from completing the paper). Around the middle of May, he favorited my tweet, and I had a renewed determination to publish the paper. Maybe he would see it.

Finally, May rolled around, and I turned in the eight-page paper and waited for my professor’s response. I was, and still am, very proud of it, because I loved taking a movie I adore and examining it more closely.

On May 20 – which was my birthday, no less – I was already having a good day when I got my graded paper back. I think I got an 89/100, but I can’t remember the exact score. I did pretty well though. I immediately compiled and formatted it and posted it to Tumblr, seeing as my friends were pestering me about it. I didn’t really expect much to happen with it; I just thought that I could contribute to the conversation a bit more than usual. Almost as a joke, I tweeted the link to Dean, on the off-chance he might be interested in reading it, and went about returning my textbooks (this also happened to be the day when I went home for the summer).

Imagine my shock then when my phone began buzzing while I was in line and I unlocked it to see these:

What. Just. Happened.

I think I might have turned my phone off and on just to make sure it wasn’t a mistake – but I do distinctly remember letting out a small squeal and promptly excusing myself from the premises so I could react more freely. The director of my favorite films of all time had not only noticed but had ACTUALLY READ my paper that I put so much thought and care into! This was a person whose work ethic and creativity I admired so much as a writer, and he was complimenting ME on MY WORK. He also re-tweeted the link to the essay, and to this day I have a screenshot of it on my phone.

All in all, I don’t think I could have ever asked for a better birthday present that day. It was truly one of the best days of my life.

In case you want to check out the paper in its entirety, I’ve created a separate page for on it my Tumblr account, which you can access here. I’d be happy to discuss it further.

That’s it for this week! Let me know if there’s something you would like to see me talk about in the future. Thanks for sticking around!

-Helen