Five years after the Viking village of Berk made peace with the dragons, they now live among the villagers as helpful companions. Hiccup goes on adventures with his dragon, Toothless, as they discover and map unexplored lands and territories. Having come of age, he is being pressed by his father, Stoick the Vast, to succeed him as the chief, although Hiccup remains unsure if he is ready for this responsibility.
The call to adventure When Hiccup and Astrid are exploring a new place, they find an ice cave that results to be a fort where they meet Eret, who blames them for the destruction of his fort and the dissappearance of his dragons for Drago, the conqueror. Hiccup and Astrid return to Berk in order to warn Stoick about about Drago's dragons army, so Stoick orders the villagers to prepare for battle. Stoick explains that he once met Drago at a gathering of chiefs, where he murders everyone after being mocked for offering the chiefs his services in return for their servitude and total obedience. However, Hiccup refuses to believe that war is imminent, so he wants to go and search for Drago in order to reason with him and stop the war.
Accepting the call Hiccup tells his father that he's going to find Eret so he takes him to see Drago, but Stoick refuses to let him go because it is too dangerous. Hiccup doesn't care about the risk so he flies off with Toothless in search of him.
Entering the unknown During his journey, Hiccup gets captured by Valka, a dragon rider who results to be his mother. She explains that she was unable to kill dragons, so she pretended to be dead and ran away. She has spent 20 years rescuing dragons that were captured by Drago, and bringing them to an island made of ice by the Bewilderbeast, the alpha dragon. In the island, Hiccup sees the majesty of all kinds of dragons being together and in peace, and he also discovers that baby dragons are immune to the alpha's control. Stoick tracks Hiccup to the island and discovers that his wife is alive.
Supernatural aid and helpers Valka shows Hiccup the goodness of dragons and how they can be easily manipulated by the one who's in control. When Stoick dies, Valka encourages Hiccup by saying he's the only one who can unite humans and dragons. Inspired by these words, Hiccup returns to save Berk and stop Drago. Astrid and Hiccup's friends are always supporting him too, so when the time of war comes, they engage in battle alongside him.
Tests & the supreme ordeal Drago and his army approach to Valka's sanctuary, where the battle begins. Hiccup tries to convince Drago to stop the war, but Drago orders him killed as well as Toothless and the rest of the dragons in the sanctuary. Toothless is compelled by Drago's Bewilderbeast to kill Hiccup, but Stoick pushes his son out of the way, dying instantly. After Stoick's funeral, Hiccup returns to battle in order to defeat Drago and save his village. But first, he struggles to recover control of Toothless.
Restoring the world Hiccup manages to get Toothless back. Toothless challenges the alpha and Drago's Bewilderbeast freezes him and Hiccup. However, Toothless melts the ice and reveals himself as the new alpha dragon, so he and the rest of the dragons start shooting fire at Drago and his Bewilderbeast, making them run away and dissappear in the ocean. Peace is restored between dragons and humans, Berk is safe and Hiccup is proclaimed the new chief of the village.
Rainbows often symbolize transfiguration, and behave as a bridge between earth and paradise.
The Blue Meanies represent the bad people on the world.
Color yellow represents the sun and light. The color is also related to the human mind and intellect. It is optimistic and cheerful.
The big green apples are a reference to the Apple Records music label.
The butterflies represent transformation and hope, they are also related to rebirth.
Doors represent a passage from one place to another, between different states, lightness and darkness. The act of passing over the threshold signifies that one must leave behind materialism and personality to confront inner silence and meditation. An open door means welcome and invites discovery and investigation, while a closed door represents rejection, protection, secrecy, exclusion and imprisonment.
The sea is a symbol of life. A journey across the sea can be seen as a symbolic journey across the "sea of life"
The shaking hands symbolize peace, frienship and alliance, while the blue hand represents fear and destruction.
A symbol is a thing that represents or stands for something else, especially a material object representing something abstract. For example, in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”, the black bird stands for death and loss. An absent reality is the one in which symbols take you to a different and non-conscious reality, based on the meaning you give to a certain symbol.
There are different kinds of symbols in literature, such as: ·Colors:red represents danger and passion. Green means life and hope. Yellow represents age and decay. Blue symbolizes peace. Orange represents strong spiritualism or sexual love. Purple can symbolize royalty and pain, while violet means clear mindedness. Brown represents the earth and it can also be tied to humility. White represents innocence and enlightment, and pink suggests feminity, and black is related to death and evil. ·Nature: Seasons represent the progression of human life: spring (birth), summer (maturity), fall (old age) and winter (death). The sun and gold are masculine symbols, while the moon and silver are feminine. The apple tree symbolizes temptation, the sycamore represents vanity, the oak represents strength and the chestnut, foreknowledge. · Directions: The four compass directions are seen as symbols of different things, depending on the work in question. The east is tied to birth and renewal. The west is related to decrepitude and the end of things. The north is a place of death, hostility and loneliness, while the south symbolizes comfort, strength and peace. ·Animals: the lion and the peacock are associated with pride, but the lion is also a symbol of strength, while the peacock's pride represents vanity. Owls are wise, hawks are observant and ravens are a signal of death. The salmon is also a symbol of wisdom, while the mouse represents humility and fear. Foxes and cats both symbolize trickery, but the cat is clever, while the fox is sneaky. Snakes are often a symbol of evil and temptation.
In films, almost everything can be used as a symbol. For example:
A character: In “Black Swan” Nina's mother is a symbol of sexual restrain, while Lily is a symbol of sexual freedom. The White Swan part of Nina is a symbol of childhood and control, and the Black Swan symbolizes matureness and wildness.
The plot: In “The Truman Show”, the story of a man living a fake life is just a symbol for the whole "Reality vs Dream" existential question, which comes from the times of Descartes.
Sound: Star Wars is a clear example of this maily because of the Imperial March, which is a symbol of Darth Vader. This theme has a clear military, powerful, oppressive feeling to it which matches the character it was made for.
An allegorical symbol is a figure of speech in which abstract ideas and principles are described in terms of characters, figures and events. An example of this is the movie The Wizard of Oz, in which cowardice is represented in the lion, thoughtless panic in the scarecrow, and so on.
The signifier is a form which the sign takes or something that can be touched, seen, and so on and the signified is the concept it represents. Example: a bird that symbolizes freedom; a rose that represents passion.
Carl Jung believed that symbols were a key in understanding human nature. A symbol, as defined by Jung, is the “best possible expression for something essentially unknown”. Symbolic thinking is holistic, right-brain oriented, and it is complementary to logical, left-brain thinking. An example of Jung’s symbols is the shadow, which is a representation of the personal unconscious as a whole that usually embodies the compensating values to those held by the conscious personality.
The importance of Cirlot’s work is that became aware of the ‘symbolist ethos’ of modern art, because symbolic elements are present in all art, in so far as art is subject to psychological interpretation. This is why Cirlot had this need to understand and clarify every symbol in all its aspects. “Dictionary of Symbols” is useful and important because we can use it as a tool to recognize and understand symbols that are present in every aspect that we need to analize, such as literature, paintings and even films. There are many entries on this dictionary, those on architecture, color, nature, graphics, numbers, etc. Examples of words are: ·Bell: its sound is a symbol of creative power. Since it is in a hanging position, it partakes of the mystic significance of all objects which are suspended between heaven and earth. It is related, by its shape, to the vault and, consequently, to the heavens. ·Juice: represents life-giving liquid. It is a sacrificial symbol connected with blood and also with light as the distillation of igniferous bodies, suns and stars. · Leaf: one of the eight “common emblems” of Chinese symbolism, it is an allegory of happiness. When several leaves appear together as a motif, they represent people.
Ernst Cassirer argues that man is a "symbolic animal". Whereas animals perceive their world by instincts and direct sensory perception, humans create a universe of symbolic meanings. Humanity can’t be known directly, but has to be known through the analysis of the symbolic universe that man has created historically. He is particularly interested in natural language and myth. An example of Cassirer’s interest in human language is the word “fire”, which can be used to express fear when people are in a dangerous situation.
Gille Deleuze brought film studies closer to philosophy. For Deleuze, film was superior to other arts because it combines time and movement in such a necessary fashion. More than that, cinema must be considered as a philosophy because it constructs its own “concepts.” Cinema is not an applied philosophy submitted to traditional philosophical concepts, but it develops “cinematic” concepts through different symbols presented along a movie. Symbols are there as an allusion of something that wants to be noted by the audience, and that makes films an interest subject for a philosophical study.
According to Northrop Frye, the extrinsic mystery is the mystery of the unknown or unknownable essence when art is an illustration of something else, whereas the intrinsic mystery is the revelation of something unlimited in the art, no matter how well we know it.
An archetype is a character, symbol, or behavioral pattern that is a universal template for a character that is copied throughout all forms of storytelling. Archetypes were first seen in the writings of Plato and then later Sophocles, although it was popularized by Carl Jung. In literature, the use of archetypical characters and situations gives a literary work a universal acceptance, as readers identify the characters and situations in their social and cultural context. The writers attempt to impart realism to their works, as the situations and characters are drawn from the experiences of the world. Some examples are: ·The hero (archetype of character) is a character who predominantly exhibits goodness and struggles against evil, in order to restore harmony and justice to society .For example, Hercules. ·The mentor (archetype of character), whose task is to protect the main character. It is through the wise advice and training of a mentor that the main character achieves success in the world. For example, Gandalf in “The Lords of Rings”. ·The villain (archetype of character), whose main function is to oppose the hero in order to avoid him/her to bring justice. For example, The Joker in “Batman”. ·The journey (archetype of situation), in which the main character takes a journey that may be physical or emotional to understand his/her personality and the nature of the world. Examples are Dante’s “The Divine Comedy” and Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travel”.
Symbols in arts (literature and films)
Grapes: pleasure, abundance, fulfillment, and a life free from care
Fire: anger, passion, love, pain or death. It can also mean rebirth (the phoenix)
Light: used for truth, enlightenment, safety, or it can be used as a holy image
Water (rain): depression, human tears
Sun: source of light, heat and life; masculinity
Moon: changing and returning shape, feminity
Dance: to break free
The city: wealth of culture, diversity, history, art, affluence and design.
Woman: can be related to innocence but also to temptation.
Forest: the human subconscious, the mind and thoughts
Stairs: the lessons learned in life, which bring us higher and higher in knowledge, success (if going up).
The film starts with Godard's off voice saying: "ne changer rien pour que tout soit different" (do not change anything so everything is different). History doesn't change, but you can establish a different approach on details. This means that even if we try to change the whole story, it will have the same meaning because we already have certain feelings and opinions about it. If we allow history to stay the same but we change our ways of thinking, it'll have a completely different meaning to us because it lets us analize it in a different way. Sometimes we pay attention to new particular details when we see the same film, and it depends a lot on our humor and what we're thinking on that moment, so it also helps us to give the same film a different meaning than the one we thought about the first time we saw it.
The very opening of Historie(s) du cinema embeds a literary citation, “Hoc opus, hic labor est,” the Sibyl’s warning to Aenea’s descent to and return from the underworld. This fits in the history of cinema because since early ages we’ve been challenging everybody to prove we’re superior; but as usual, there’s always a chance for failure so we need to try to be the best, taking into consideration the mistakes that have been made by others in the past so we can avoid them and have better results.
Godard responded to an exasperated critic’s bewilderment, that his films didn’t have a beginning, middle and an end, with, “they do, but not necessarily in that order”. It is hard for me to say which order does Toutes les histories follow, but it was obvious that it doesn’t follow a determined order because, in my opinion, the sequences don’t have a very strict and close correlation with the other one, so it can’t have a logical structure. What matters is that despite the order the film follows, the message you want to transmit must be understood anyways.
The very first shot of Historie(s) du Cinéma certainly begins in the middle of film history, with a shot of a man with a camera, not a movie camera, but still a camera, with a telephoto lens, held at a little distance from his eye. The shot is in slow motion so we can see his anxious eyeballs moving from side to side. It is a tight shot of Jimmy Stewart from Hitchcock’s Rear Window 1954, hooked on to a screen, so to speak; a surrogate for us, the spectators. This represents that everything in this world is changing in front of our eyes, and we start getting a little anxious to be conscious about everything that’s going on right now.
“May each eye negotiate for itself” means that everybody has a different perspective of a particular thing. While someone thinks something is beautiful, another person may think it’s ugly and disgusting.
By “Don’t show every side of things, allow yourself a margin for the indefinite”, Godard means that having those blank spaces on a story allows people to start thinking about what’s going to happen next. This helps people to be motivated and interested on something. Otherwise, if they knew everything, life would be very boring.
The word TOI (you) is very strong and powerful because it means that you are the only one who knows how you think, and that your perspective about something is unique, even though it has common aspects with someone else’s perspective.
The artist’s role in society and in cinema is depicted with references to Jean Renoir’s La Règle du jeu (1939) (The Rules of the Game) as if to an exemplary combination of formal innovation and political commitment. This means that despite everybody must follow some socially acceptable behaviors, an artist can do things different because there are no clear rules for art, so they just do what it feels right. Nicholas Ray is important for Godard because he was an influence for him. That’s why there’s a lot of references of Nicholas Ray in Godard’s works. “There was theater (Griffith), poetry (Murnau), painting (Rossellini), dance (Eisenstein), music (Renoir). Henceforth there is cinema. And the cinema is Nicholas Ray”.
“Le cinema substitute a notreregard un monde qui s’accorde a nos desires” means that movies are created in order to fulfill our interests and desires because movies are a way for us to express how we see things.
Cinema is the best way to discuss the history of cinema because it can show things in a way that other forms of art can’t.
Cinema replaces the way we see life, because we can change things that in real life would just be impossible. It is said on the movie that cinema replaces perfume.
Irving Thalberg is the last tycoon because he had an extraordinary ability to produce excellent films in every aspect, like the cast and the script.
The power of Hollywood lies anywhere a movie can be seen. It can be at a movie theater or simply at home.
“A film is a girl and a gun”. Godard says that this is all you need to make a good movie because it’s what people want to see. I agree with this because nowadays most of the movies contain this to particular things and give them a lot of importance.
Kino Pravda’s purpose is to show truth-film. In other words, it shows everyday experiences without changing anything. It relates with the idea of a “Dream factory” and the image of Lenin’s corpse, because when he was alive he had a very strict control over his country so people couldn’t express their ideas freely. When he died, his regime came down with him, allowing people to think and do what they want, and that’s how the dream factory was born.
By “Aquel que ha pasado por el cine y ha conservado la marca no puede entrar en otro lugar”, Godard means that Once you’ve been introduced to artistic means and defined the boundaries of what you consider your reality is, you can't go back to the way you were before or appreciate the things with the past simplicity. You get marked by culture, a more conscious way of thinking, because the perspective you have developed makes you see things in a more complex and intellectual way.
Howard Hughes was an American business tycoon, investor, aviator, aerospace engineer, inventor, filmmaker and philanthropist who gained prominence in Hollywood from the late 1920s, making big-budget and often controversial films like The Racket (1928), Hell's Angels (1930), Scarface (1932) and The Outlaw (1943). I’m not sure if Godard disliked him, but I think that if he did, it was because Hughes had a lot of money so he could do anything he wanted when he produced a movie, so maybe Godard was jealous of him.
There’s an allusion to witchcraft because they say that women used witchcraft to get whatever they want, like a man or material stuff.
Godard depicts Orson Welles because they both were very philosophical people who had very intelligent thoughts about films. They preferred good, meaningful movies instead of just entertaining films with no sense at all
“Humiliated and offended” refers to the movies that were never produced and stayed just in ideas, so they were lost. These films were despised and discarded so they never got the chance to cause an impact on the society because it couldn’t deliver the message they were intended to.
The point of using Hitler’s images is to show in a critic and sarcastic way how reality can be hidden sometimes to people because they show in movies (and even on the news) only what they want. We all know what Hitler did, but he refused to accept his acts and he wanted people to believe that he only wanted the best for the world.
Regarding to the German invasion of France, Godard was not happy with it, because he’s French after all.
Malraux said that “The masses love myth and cinema addresses the masses. But if myth begins with Fantomas it ends with Christ. What did the crowds hear when they listened to Saint Bernard preach? Something other than what he said? Perhaps, no doubt. But how can we ignore what we understand when that unknown plunges deep into our hearts?”. This means that masses can be difficult to convince about something, because they only hear what they want to hear, so you have to choose your words carefully so you can make them think about it and change their ways of thinking.
Godard had a very good opinion of the cinematographer’s vision because they had beautiful and unique ideas that could be turned into a very good film, and not everybody has that capability.
Godard says “isn’t life wonderful” in a way for us to think that life can be really good if we want it to be that way. We’re the ones who are constantly complaining about little details making us unhappy with life, so we must change our ways of thinking so we can live a better one.
“The final conclusion the viewer can reach is that cinema has impregnated every aspect of society”. This means that movies had changed our ways of seeing life because they capture aspects of it that mark us emotionally and intellectually speaking. We certainly are influenced by movies, and that’s why we’re used to watch them in a regular basis, because they have the power to make us feel identified with their characters, plot, etc. and we feel like our life is like a very interesting film.