Sometimes you can judge a movie’s creativity based on its characters names alone. Sure, plenty of brilliant movies have starred Jims and Janes and Georges, but think of what the zany brilliance of The Princess Bride would have been without names like Inigo Montoya, Fezzick, and Prince Humperdinck. Or how about all those invented, majestic names for The Lord of the Rings, where names like Gimli and Aragorn tell you so much about a character.
That’s why I’ve got a lot of hope for How to Train Your Dragon, the animated movie from DreamWorks due in 2010. Today The Hollywood Reporter printed a long list of names that will be joining the cast, along with the characters they will play. The brilliance is not just in the talent they chose—though this is a strong, albeit young, bunch—but in matching the actors to their roles.
Leading the pack will be Jay Baruchel, the skinny, geeky kid familiar from Undeclared and as part of the gang of slacker roommates in Knocked Up. He’s voicing the main character, a timid boy tasked with capturing a dragon in order to be accepted by his trip. His name? Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the Third. Playing his dad is Abs of Steel Gerard Butler, a fearsome Viking warrior named Stoick the Vast.
Also on board is Baruchel’s Knocked Up co-star Jonah Hill, who plays a jealous bully in the tribe named Snotlout. And Hill brought along a Superbad co-star, the skinny geek-a-thon Christopher Mintz Plasse a.k.a. McLovin, who plays a dim-witted Viking named Fishlegs.
Finally there’s America Ferrara as Astrid, Hiccup’s friend, who probably has the most boring name of the bunch. But the rest of those names are hilariously perfect, and indicate that there are some real creative minds going into this movie. The book by Cressida Cowell clearly gets the credit for the names, but director Peter Hastings, after all, worked on the mid-90s cartoon series Animaniacs, which was the ultimate in animated lunacy. I’m not too excited about having to wait two years, but I’ll be excited when How To Train Your Dragon finally comes my way.
