As dragons swoop back onto the big screen with the live-action adaptation of DreamWorks How To Train Your Dragon, Blocks explores the development behind LEGO Icons 10375 How To Train Your Dragon: Toothless with Model Designer Jae Won Lee.
When creating Toothless for the original animated film, DreamWorks Head of Character Simon Otto was influenced by a range of animals including a panther, bats, hawks and even snakes. Otto then incorporated the behaviour of cats, dogs and horses into Toothless, which helps to explain how the Night Fury can be a ferocious predator one moment and is then happy to be given head scratches by Hiccup. The animators spent months refining the design as Toothless is nothing like he’s described in the original books by Cressida Cowell, so they were basically inventing every species of dragon.
Yet this then posed the biggest challenge to LEGO Model Designer Jae Won Lee when working on the chibi style model. Toothless is incredibly iconic. Fans of the franchise know exactly what he looks like and are easily able to notice how his design evolved throughout the films. If you compare the animation of Toothless in the original film to the sequels, you’ll notice how the animators changed his eyes to be rounder and more expressive. So this is where Jae began 10375 How To Train Your Dragon: Toothless – getting the eyes perfect.
“The pupil is absolutely iconic. When Hiccup first meets Toothless they make eye contact and his eyes get bigger, become greener, as their friendship grows,” explains Jae, referring to how Toothless transforms from being a predator scared of Hiccup and having slitted pupils, to being friendlier and having rounder, more expressive pupils. “So getting the eye and eyebrows right was essential.” The new half curved tiles were specially printed just to help achieve this iconic shape and realistic highlight.
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Yet achieving this rounded shape then meant that Jae had to ensure the rest of the face fitted around the eyes without any gaps or sacrificing the overall shape. “Toothless has a curvy body but a flat head with many horns on top. So I had to make a lot of different angles with curved elements and wedge tiles. It took multiple mock-ups to get the right shape!” laughs Jae as he reminisces about balancing the animated style with the chibi proportions. He relied on the recent LEGO triangular tiles to help smooth the transition between Toothless’ eyes and ears, which then helpfully doubled as some scale texture.
Amidst these organic shapes is the saddle that Hiccup makes for Toothless. “It was a very important element in the movie and for this model,” continues Jae, “It’s not just a tool that Hiccup used to make them fly, but it symbolises the trust between them.” A selection of brown tiles come together to imitate the leather Hiccup sewed himself and a few brown studs are also added to the tail to imitate the straps for the prosthetic Toothless wears.
And this is where Jae was able to incorporate a fun easter egg. He’s a huge fan of the How To Train Your Dragon series but his favourite is the second film. So when it came to the design on the tail prosthetic, Jae chose to go with the emblem seen in How To Train Your Dragon 2. “Initially I tried fabric but it didn’t work as well as the bricks,”” explains Jae, “This emblem is then from the second movie.” As Hiccup is always improving and tinkering with his designs, Toothless goes through multiple tail fins. The emblem in the first How To Train Your Dragon movie was a Viking helmet in the shape of a skull, but in the sequel this has been slightly changed to include a bottom jaw bone.
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