'How To Train Your Dragon': Director shares insight on creating Toothless

How To Train Your Dragon’s innocent and lovable dragon, Toothless, almost didn’t look like himself in the live-action version.

How To Train Your Dragon director Dean DeBlois has revealed that the design team almost made Toothless look very different from the animated version.

“We went too far a couple of times in exploring where Toothless could have come from,” Dean told Discussing Film.

However, advice from an expert stopped them from making the mistake of creating a very different Toothless.

“We received some advice from John Dykstra. He’s a legendary visual effects person from ILM, and he was consulting with Universal at the time. He said to think backwards, like if the animated movie is a stylized and exaggerated version of these creatures, then what did they look like in real life? It was a great philosophy to adopt as the designers at Framestore started to explore the other dragons,” he said.

While the team still took some chances with the other dragons, they understood that fans wanted Toothless to look like himself.

“We could depart from some of the cartoonish designs with the other dragons. But with Toothless, in particular, he’s so iconic and so expressive,” the filmmaker shared. “He’s already quite specific that as we tried to change his face and maybe make his mouth or eyes smaller, or shift proportions around, he stopped feeling like the character very quickly.”

“So, we decided to retain the Stitch-like proportions of the eyes to the nose to the mouth, but then work on his body and make it feel convincing and realistic in terms of his skeleton, musculature, and iridescent scales. We really wanted to lean into his black panther animal reference,” he continued, referring to Stitch from the original Lilo & Stitch, which Dean co-wrote and co-directed.