How accurate are movies’ depictions of places?
This mystery will take about two hours to complete. Pick out a good, clean, wholesome movie to watch with a friend or relative.
• Watch it as a geographer would, intensively looking for patterns and processes and place. Answer the following:
• Name of Movie: How to Train Your Dragon
• Place(s) Shown: Island, Ocean, Woodlands, Mountains, Fjords, rocky shore side, fog, rock jutting out of the coast
• Does the movie make you believe that they were really there? Well for starters the movie was a cartoon. I picked this movie to watch because I was interested in how a cartoon would portray geography. The movie is about a group of Vikings, and I wanted to see if the cartoon geography would parallel with the actual geography of Scandinavia. This movie did make be believe that I was in the frozen Scandinavia land. Why or why not? In the introduction of the film the character talks about how cold the island is most of the year, and you see a shot of a sheep. I looked up sheep herd locations and there are a few thousand herds along the coast of Norway. I also googled coast lines in Scandinavia, and there were some breathtaking shots of Fjord coast. Just as in the movie the coast was not beach coasts, but sharp rock walls. Much of the movie takes place in the forest near the village throughout the movie there were was a lot of fog particular on the ocean. When the town reaches the dragon next it is an island surrounded by rock formations, and the actual island nest does not have any vegetation on it. This was the most unbelievable location, because of the almost overly dramatic rock formations, and the lack of vegetation. There is one scene were the main character dives into the water to save his dragon, and I thought about how cold the water would be if the movie really was in Norway. I looked up the current temperature in Norway and it was below freezing. That scene was probably a little unrealistic and I imagine the main character would have frozen to death before reaching his dragon friend.
• How much of the film is actually outside where you can see what is going on? The majority of the film was outside. There are a few sections that were filmed inside the houses, but this too could have been considered place geography. The houses had a lot “Viking” cultural images including design, food, and clothing. Because the movie is about dragons there are several scenes in the sky. Even in one of the scenes in the sky the movie brought in geography, because you can see the aurora borealis.
• Did they make any geographic mistakes? This was a movie about dragons, the plot, characters, and I would even say the geography was the least to say a little exaggerated.
• Is the place “nowhere”, meaning that it is set in an imaginary or fictitious place? Yes, but it was based on the geography of Scandinavia because the characters were all Vikings. If so, were you convinced? I found a few reviews for the book that the movie is based on. In there I discovered a map. The Isle of Berk is the setting for most of the film, and one of the smallest inhabited islands in the Barbaric Sea. The Barbaric Archipelago includes the Meathead Island, North Island and Cannibal Island. I wanted to see if any of these islands were real places, or if they were based on actual world locations. After searching for a while I discovered a few islands that could be possible locations Birka near Stockholm, Sweden. Whenever I typed Barbaric Sea in the search engine all that came up information about Vikings and the movie, but not an actual location. I found one reference that claimed the Baltic Sea could also be called the Barbaric Sea, but some of this information was hard to shift through, because another site labeled the east coast of Africa as the Barbaric Sea due to the slave trade. The Baltic Sea on the other hand is a real location between Sweden and Finland. It is bounded by the Scandinavian Peninsula, and was the home for many Vikings. The only idea with this is that as I looked through images on Google I realized that the Baltic Sea coast line is more sloped and pebbled than the coast line in the movies. While the giant fjords and looming rock formations featured in the film are characteristics of the western coast of Norway. Although I saw many fjords in the Baltic Sea pictures the coast line appeared more subtle than that in the movie. I think that although the geography was exaggerated in the film there are locations in the world that are closely similar to the islands and oceans in the movie How to Train Your Dragon.
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• Map of the Barbaric Sea taken from the Book Review
Toothless99. How To Train Your Dragon: Isle of Berk. Wikia. Web. March 2011.
Aurora Borealis- The Northern Lights Norway- Tromso. The Top Ten Site.come Reviews you Can Trust. Web. March 2011.
Viking. Wikipedia; The Free Encyclopedia. Web. March 2011. < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking>
When to Go. Frommer’s. Web. March 2011.
Scandinavia. Wikipedia; The Free Encyclopedia. Web. March 2011.
Birka. Wikipedia; The Free Encyclopedia. Web. March 2011.
Lewis, Martin. Dividing the Ocean Sea. The Geographical Reivew. 1999. Web. March 2011. Questia; Trusted Online Research.
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