For Dean DeBlois, it all started with the eyes. Even as a working class kid in the Canadian suburbs of Quebec—which is about a million miles away from the life he would lead as an artist and filmmaker, writer and director—he could immediately understand the innocence of an extraterrestrial’s gaze in Steven Spielberg’s seminal 1982 film, E.T.: The Extraterrestrial.
“I think that childlike quality that you [pair] with the distributing proportions of his body just makes you want to reach out and hug him,” DeBlois says about both Carlo Rambaldi’s creature design and the overall effect of E.T. as a touchstone memory. “He is a strange design with a telescoping neck, but I think it’s the chubby body and the squat little feet that make him feel like something that Charles Schulz might have designed. And the big eyes. We’ve leaned into that with every character that we’ve designed, really, because there’s just something so appealing.”
DeBlois is referring to Toothless, of course, the huggable dragon with feline pupils in every one of the How to Train Your Dragon movies DeBlois has worked on as a writer and director—with Chris Sanderson in the original 2010 animated film—as well as Stitch, whom DeBlois also co-created with Sanderson in the original 2002 Disney film. But when he stops by our Den of Geek Studio for the latest episode of In the Den, it is to discuss how all of these characters—Toothless, Stitch, and maybe even Cri-Kee in the animated Mulan (1998)—owe something to seeing E.T. in theaters as a kid.
DeBlois was 12 years old when E.T. came out, and despite not having money to see many films in theaters more than once, he made a special exception for the film about a boy finding friendship and magic with a creature no one else knew about.
“I grew up in a suburb that was built in the 1970s and it looks like it,” DeBlois says. “It’s a conservative, quiet little environment. And being a kid who was gay, that was also something that was this bizarre thing I had to hide and struggle with. There was no representation of what that looked like in a successful adult life, which caused me to be quite insular and rely upon stories and rely upon drawing, and being this odd little kid. I was always out of sorts, cut of a different cloth than all of my sporty friends.”
DeBlois saw himself in young Henry Thomas’ Elliott in E.T., as well as the alien who felt the need to hide away from the world. At least until he could take off and fly over the moon.
“That’s maximum wish fulfillment right there, to be able to take to the skies and fly around with your best friend,” says DeBlois, “I feel like that crosses cultures. It seems to be the core wish fulfillment of How to Train Your Dragon and why it speaks to so many.”
Indeed, DeBlois admits he very much sees the story of Hiccup and Toothless, which he has told in animation and now live-action thanks to this weekend’s How to Train Your Dragon remake, as his own Elliott and E.T.
“What they perceive as their own weakness, or what makes them less than special, that gets acknowledged by this entity,” DeBlois considers. “In the case of E.T., he sees something in Elliott that’s pure and it shapes a bond in the same way that Toothless sees something in Hiccup. He’s not like the other Vikings. There’s something about him and his empathy, his compassion that causes a bond that would ultimately lead to a situation where they are each other’s protector.”
It’s a kinship DeBlois has only heightened in this weekend’s number one new film, How to Train Your Dragon.
“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.”
Like E.T., Hiccup and Toothless have found their way home.
How to Train Your Dragon is in theaters now. You can watch the rest of our conversation in the video above.
The post Why Steven Spielberg and E.T. Made How to Train Your Dragon’s Big Emotions Possible appeared first on Den of Geek.
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