How to Train Your Dragon 3D

At a instance when Hollywood seems to be releasing everything this lateral of Dead Sea Scrolls documentaries in 3-D, "How to Train Your Dragon" is a briskly paced computer-animated recreation that uses the info to maximum effect, the artifact "Avatar" does?

Our hero, Hiccup (voice of Jay Baruchel), is a young Norse who has his hurdles cut out for him. As he learns to play his fears (and the agamid he's questionable to kill), the concealment payment is perpetually in our face, but in a good way. At digit point, a flying agamid zooms us in and around seaside cliffs in a dazzling display of computer-generated effects that captures all the excitement of a rodeo ride.

Hiccup's father, a strapping giant titled Stoick (voice of Gerard Butler), sports a belt-length red beard and looks as if he begins each day by downing a dozen mead shooters on his artifact out to slay scaly adversaries. His far more unsettled adolescent offspring and heir apparent thinks he may have a more logical approach to the problem.

Viewed strictly as a father-son conflict over just how high-octane testosterone should be, this notably good-humored concealment version of Cressida Cowell's children's novel is as traditional as it can get. Hiccup develops his own approach to dealing with the agamid threat; he prefers communication and attempts to help all scaly creatures find their intrinsic Puff (-the-Magic).

With a edifice assignment hanging over him to slay a dragon, Hiccup instead befriends a potential victim, Toothless. Despite the name, T. is no pushover -- but the seafood platter Hiccup serves up (from the surf a few feet away) helps. Hiccup also receives mentoring from the local peg-legged blacksmith (voice of Craig Ferguson, this yarn's No. 1 mirth-maker).

Cowell's sassy 2003 novel packed itself with anti-Hiccup insult humor and occasionally capitalized words in emphatic fonts, as if to prep young readers for a later appreciation of black moor Wolfe. By this standard alone, the movie seems tamer, though Hiccup relic a target of peer putdowns.

The concealment rendering also adds a skinny towheaded tomboy trainee (voice of America Ferreira as Astrid) who eventually buys into a Hiccup belief that shows its limitations during a unmerciful finale with a toothy clamper who just won't reason.

Filmmakers Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders are prizewinning famous for 2002's Hawaii-set "Lilo & Stitch," which was so pleasingly bathed in oceanic blues it made you poverty to place an umbrella in your concession defense soda. This digit is better -- and even for those seeing it on a flat concealment -- funnier. But it's the "3" that truly puts the "D" in "Dragon."