How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World – Written and directed by Dean DeBlois. Starring the voices of Jay Baruchel, America Ferrera, F. Murray Abraham, Cate Blanchett, Gerard Butler, Craig Ferguson, Jonah Hill, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Kristen Wiig, Justin Rupple, Kit Harrington, and David Tennant

**** out of ****

The trilogy may be one of the hardest feats to pull off in movies, given how many great film series have stumbled on the last leg. The Sam Raimi Spider-Man, the original X-Men trilogy, The Godfather, The Hobbit, Shrek – cinema history is littered with them. There’s only a few select masterpieces that pulled off the hat trick – Toy Story, Star Wars, and Lord of the Rings all come to mind. But now, with the release of How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, we have a new entry. Because the third installment in Dreamworks’ “A Boy and his Dragon” story is every bit as great as the two before it.

When the first How to Train Your Dragon was released in 2010, it slipped under the radar before winning widespread acclaim due to its well-written characters and surprisingly mature themes. The story of a scrawny Viking boy who attempts to impress his stern dragon-hunting father by downing a legendary Night Fury, only to bond with the wounded dragon and try to forge peace between the two species, went places kid-friendly animated series rarely do. It dealt with a complex and combative father-son relationship and shocked everyone in the final act when young Hiccup lost his leg in battle with a giant queen dragon – an almost-unheard of representation of a teen with a disability in kids’ entertainment. Hiccup and his dragon Toothless (missing part of his tail fin) both became iconic characters often used in prosthetic-fitting centers to make kids more comfortable.

How to Train Your Dragon 2, when it was released in 2014, almost aged the characters in real time and picked up with Hiccup and his friends just out of their teens. It deepened Hiccup’s relationship with beautiful Viking warrior Astrid, reintroduced Hiccup’s long-missing mother Valka (revealed to be running a dragon sanctuary), and introduced the series’ first major human villain – Drago Bludvist, a mad barbarian who had enslaved dragons and was using them to conquer the Viking world. Hiccup’s father Stoick’s sacrifice, falling in battle against a mind-controlled Toothless, was easily the series’ darkest moment.

(The less said about the animated spin-off series, which introduced a host of ancillary characters and forgettable villains, the better.)

How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World opens one year after the second movie, and Hiccup’s attempt to bring peace between humans and dragons to his village of Berk has worked – maybe a little too well. Berk is filled with thousands of dragons alongside its Viking population, and chaos has ensued. After an opening segment involving Hiccup and his group of allies (Astrid, Valka, boastful Snotlout, good-natured dragon-lover Fishlegs, and offbeat twins Ruffnut and Tuffnut) rescuing captured dragons from trappers, they bring the new dragons back to the island and nearly destroy it in the process. One of the best things about this series is the way they keep on inventing new dragon species. I was particularly fond of the Hobgobbler, a hilarious little toad-like dragon that’s supposed to be an ill omen – village blacksmith Gobber is completely terrified of them.

Running out of space on Berk, the Vikings decamp on a search for a mythical dragon paradise spoken of by Hiccup’s father, the Hidden World. But Toothless is distracted by a rare sight – an apparent female of his species, the Light Fury. While Toothless was thought to be the last of his kind after they were hunted to extinction, this camouflaged axolotl-inspired dragon instantly catches his fancy. The dragon “Courtship” is one of the funniest scenes in the movie – a near-silent comedy inspired by silent film as Toothless attempts to woo the Light Fury with dances, gestures, and even drawings.

But danger is lurking in the form of Grimmel the Grisly, a twisted dragon hunter voiced by F. Murray Abraham. While I was initially disappointed Drago wouldn’t return from How to Train Your Dragon 2, I have to say I think Grimmel may be an even better replacement. Essentially a dragon serial killer who uses guile and trapping to hunt the Night Fury to near-extinction, his introductory face-off with Hiccup is one of the most intense villain spotlights I’ve seen. And if Drago was a twisted mirror to Stoick – the mad chief who had no one to keep him from becoming war-obsessed – Grimmel fills that role for Hiccup. Another scrawny, smart Viking who is more at home designing traps and gadgets than fighting, he’s what Hiccup could have become if he had followed his father into dragon-killing.

The animation in this film is absolutely stunning, from the photo-realistic backgrounds (especially the water) to the strong character and creature work. But it reaches its peak with a trip into the bioluminescent Hidden World, one of the most surreal and beautiful locations we’ve ever gotten to visit in film. I wish it had more than one scene, but I’m certain it’s one of the most memorable moments I’ll see in film this year.

This is an epic and intense film, but it’s also a very simple one at its core. It’s a story about the bond between a boy and his closest animal friend as they come of age, with both becoming leaders of their people – and as anyone who read the book series that inspired it knows, that will eventually mean separation. The emotional punch that How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World delivers easily puts to shame the more overly manipulative reincarnating-dog movies that try to capture the same emotion.

Are there any flaws in this movie? I’d say the biggest one is that the film is so focused on Hiccup and Toothless that almost everyone else sort of gets short shrift. Astrid is key as a partner to Hiccup in battle and love, and the question of their potential marriage is another note in Hiccup’s coming of age. But Hiccup’s friends aren’t key to the story – Fishlegs gets cute moments with a baby dragon, Ruffnut and Tuffnut provide chaotic comic relief (especially Ruffnut, as the most annoying captive ever), and Gobber’s running gag with the Hobgobblers is hilarious. But Snotlout and last season’s Drago-henchman face-turn Eret are caught up in a bland and kind of creepy subplot involving Snotlout’s crush on the much-older Valka.

Perfect movies are few and far between, but like last year’s Spider-Man: Enter the Spider-Verse, How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World is so good that you can easily ignore them and be swept into the beautiful, original world and its characters. Most live-action fantasy epics would love to pull a concept on this scale off this well. While Disney dominates the box office and has the top animated franchises, I don’t know if any of them have quite reached the epic peaks that the How to Train Your Dragon series soared to. I highly recommend seeing the first two films if you haven’t, and then making a beeline to your movie theater to see the first great film of 2019.