I think the dragon's design serves it's purpose really well. It humanizes her (unlike, say, Toothless' design. Toothless is a giant bat cat pet animal dragon. Sisu is a human person kind of dragon), which is GOOD, and it's goofiness really brings her down to Earth. The characters expected a Big Legendary god-like dragon, and instead got a MLP shaped dragon. That's... kinda the point, I think. I've seen so many cool Sisu redesigns made by dissappointed fans but I can't help but feel like most of them wouldn't actually work on the movie (SOME WOULD. Some definitely would and some would even be better than the design we got, I'm not saying they wouldn't, but even if Sisu's actual design is less aesthetically pleasing, yes, it still serves it's purpose). I'm not saying that "the dragon is ugly on purpose uwu that's totally not an excuse for laziness". I'm saying that Sisu is not meant to look legendary, magestic, epic, badass, god-like or even "cool". She's a lame dragon. She's supposed to be "uncool". And she's supposed to be human-like. She seems to have a very human, very goofy personality. And an overly expressive (overly expressive in HUMAN terms, rather than cat-toothless terms), human-like and goofy design communicates this perfectly, in my opinion.
Judging by these redesigns, I feel like a lot of people's critiques aren't about the design doing a bad job at communicating what the writers meant to say (because it does!), but rather, about the dragon not being the way you would have designed her as. A lot of these redesigns interpret Sisu as very epic, very inhuman, very legendary creature. But the actual Sisu makes butt jokes and has self-esteem issues. She's fluffy. She's baby. She's cute. That's what her personality is like. Raya wanted to break the geneva convention with her dragon and instead got a floof noodle. Most of these redesigns would be much less fitting to Sisu's character and story than the one we got.
I don't think Sisu's design is perfect. Personally, I prefer her original design better. This one:
I find this one much more aesthetically pleasing, but she's also so much more "epic", and I suspect her design was simplified to express what I mentioned before: that Sisu is kind of a looser dragon. A n00b dragon. She's a virgin in a world of chads. And maybe they could have made her human-like, looser-like and still give her a better design (personally I LOVE the colors of the original one and genuinely wish they'd kept them). But the current design isn't broken. You might not like it, and that's a valid opinion, but it still works. It's not the best but it does it's job just fine. It does it's job much better than many of these redesigns people are suggesting. And they are very, very beautiful redesigns, don't get me wrong. But they sadly wouldn't have worked in this story, and that's alright.
For some odd reason, I am looking forward to this movie.
It does remind me of Avatar: The Last Air bender because of the different nations.
It also reminds me of the Kung Fu Panda trilogy. Hopefully it is on the same level when it comes to action and fight scenes.
This blog basically sums up how I feel about how everyone is reacting to Sisu the dragon. I have not even seen any of the How the Train your Dragon movies. I was a brony and I have any seen the first Frozen once so far.
The edits that fans have made of her I do not even care for and some of them are creepy to me. I saw good fan art of Sisu in her movie design and it is great. Fandoms and artist really do work fast making fan art before a movie even hits theatres.
