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ANIMATION 22 ■ CGW M ay / Ju n e 2 014 Toothless, who has a prosthetic tail fin, as they moved into the second film. "The rider and dragon are symbiotic," DeBlois says. "They are best friends. Hiccup is an ace flyer. Toothless has a certain amount of dog behavior. But, he has feral cat and domestic cat behaviors, too. Partly because of his design, he has a lot of black panther quality." Otto sees the relationship between the two as key elements in the film." Toothless and Hiccup have lived together for five years now, so they are more like college roommates," Otto says. "There is playful banter between them." He describes a scene in which the dragon mimics Hiccup's big-talking attitude, and in return, Hiccup teases Toothless when he pouts, suggesting he's a big baby. "The magic about Toothless is that he's a puppy dog on one hand and a fierce dragon on the other," Otto says. "On one side, he's 100 percent innocent, and yet he's the most danger- ous weapon one could have. For me, the key relationship in the film is between Hiccup and Toothless. That's the emotional heartbeat throughout, and we challenged that relationship. Hic- cup meeting Toothless is a talisman of our world. You believe in that to the point where you love the dragon and you want one of your own. The more tangible that is, the more people let go and enter this world." Dragon Mother Making her debut appearance in Dragon 2 is Hiccup's mother Valka, marking this animated film as one of the few in which a character's mother is alive and has a starring role. Cate Blanchett voices the reclusive vigilante. "I thought it would be fun to bring a parent back from the 'dead,' rather than to kill a parent," DeBlois says. "We didn't explain what happened to her in the first film, so she was a mystery. It was fun to delve into that. We find out that she's a wild Dian Fossey type who lives with dragons and rescues them from evildoers. She is the ultimate dragon whisperer." The idea is, as we learned in the first film, Vikings considered dragons to be enemies, so they hunted and trapped the dragons. Like her son many years later, Valka understood that dragons were not the enemy. She freed them and hid them away. Hiccup meets his mother in one of the film's key scenes. "I think his discovery that the mysterious dragon rider is his mother has a different flavor in the film than the scene in the trailer," Otto says. "It's definitely a pivotal scene. She's been gone for 20 years. She lives with dragons. How does that change her behavior?" As he had for the first film, Otto assigned supervising animators to particular characters. "Some were on the first movie, so they took on the same characters," Otto says. "They knew more about the characters than the director did. The director has to think about 15 characters, the story, the plot, what effects should do, how to stage a scene. An ani- mator thinks about one character 24 hours a day. Dean [DeB- lois] would give them the purpose of a scene, the emotional points, and say, 'Go play.' So, it wasn't 'move something 30 degrees over here.' It was much more like live action." In addition to the main characters, the actors voicing Hic- cup's peers are back, as well: Snotlout (Jonah Hill), Fishlegs (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), Gobber (Craig Ferguson), the twins Tuffnut and Ruffnut (TJ Miller and Kristen Wiig), and Hiccup's father Stoick (Gerard Butler). Like Hiccup, each character has his or her own dragon, and in addition to her dragon Cloud Jumper, Valka has a nest of dragons. Thousands of dragons. "I didn't count the full number," DeBlois says. "Our hero dragons have detailed rigs that make them capable of more performance and acting than the ones in her nest. For the nest of dragons, we took a standard body and changed tails, heads, spikes, wings, and colors to create variety." To ground the fantasy and help audiences believe in the world, the modelers and animators gave every dragon animal behaviors and real-world characteristics. "We needed armies VIDEO: Go to "Extras" in the May/June 2014 issue box .com .com ■ TOOTHLESS SOARS through an even larger world than in the first film. Animators used a new system to create the performances.