Yeah, as a fellow DreamWorks liker you should check it out if you can for sure.

Based on your estimate I’ve probably watched HTTYD around the same time as you, maybe slightly more recently, but I’ve never watched movies at a higher density of my life than the past four years so I probably would have a lot of new opinions about it.

Re: HTTYD, though I may not have even seen it more recently than you, I remember it holding up pretty well. The human character animation is slightly janky (by modern standards at least, but it is in all of them, 3 getting it the closest to right) compounded by all non-Hiccup humans being kind of miserable (which they also are in all of them), but I’m reasonably sure I recall Toothless and the finale still looking surprisingly great for a now-14 year old movie. Though, again, at the time it would’ve only been a nine year old movie. But at some point things stop improving anyway, the best CGI character animation (if obviously not texturing) that I’m aware of is still from a movie from the same year in Tangled.