Friendship and Flight

Many films use thematic development to support the narrative, although this has been less prevalent in the modern age of film in which many scores rely on drive over thematic development. One twenty-first-century score that shows great command of thematic development comes from the 2010 animated adventure How to Train Your Dragon. This score, and composer John Powell’s work in general, have been ignored from an academic standpoint despite Powell’s skillful usage of thematic development that rivals that of John Williams. In this article, I compare the dramatic and thematic associations of the themes relating to friendship in Williams’s score for E.T. (1982) and Powell’s score for How to Train Your Dragon. I scrutinize where these themes occur and their narrative import, tracing their development alongside that of the characters. Ultimately, I look at the similarities and differences of each composer’s thematic development to show how Powell’s technique sets him up as the “heirapparent” to Williams.