Story At the Central Park Zoo , Marty the zebra celebrates his tenth birthday but has grown bored with his daily routine and longs to experience the wild. Marty's best friend is Alex the lion , who enjoys showing off for the public and his celebrity status as "the king of New York". Alex attempts to cheer Marty up, but Marty, still unsatisfied, learns that the zoo's penguins —Skipper, Kowalski, Rico, and Private—are trying to escape, and follows them out. Alex, Melman the giraffe , and Gloria the hippopotamus pursue Marty and attempt to convince him to return. The four, along with the penguins and two chimpanzees named Mason and Phil, converge at Grand Central Station where the authorities sedate them using tranquilizer guns . Under pressure from anti-captivity activists, the zoo is forced to ship the escaped animals by sea to a Kenyan wildlife preserve. During their travels, the penguins es...
Story The Viking village of Berk, located on a remote island, is attacked frequently by Dragons , which take livestock, damage property and endanger lives. Hiccup, the awkward fifteen-year-old son of the village chieftain, Stoick the Vast, is deemed too scrawny and weak to fight the dragons, so he instead creates mechanical devices under his apprenticeship with Gobber, the village blacksmith, though Hiccup's inventions often backfire. During one attack, Hiccup uses a bolas launcher to shoot down a Night Fury, a dangerous and rare dragon of which little is known, but no one believes him, so he searches for the fallen dragon on his own. He finds the dragon in the forest, tangled in his net, but cannot bring himself to kill him, and instead sets him free. Stoick assembles a fleet to find the dragons' nest, and enters Hiccup in a dragon-fighting class taught by Gobber with the other teenagers, Fishlegs, Snotlout, twins Ruffnut and Tuffnut, and Astrid, a ...