What we have here, essentially, is a live-action movie with CGI elements thrown in; yes the landscapes are all real places. Crane cameras fly through the treetops, helicopter mounted cameras travel between canyon walls, then the dinosaurs are placed on top.
Unfortunate, that I’d seen it all before this movie’s release then…
To be honest Dinosaur didn’t stand much of a chance of gaining much respect from me. I’d spent a lot of my youth being dragged around places like London’s National History Museum and learnt quite a bit about dinosaurs and the periods they lived in during the process. Another nail in the coffin was the brilliant BBC documentary series “Walking with Dinosaurs” which, using the same techniques with a degree of seriousness brought infinity more dignity and majesty to these powerful prehistoric beasts a year earlier.
Unless I’m watching Doctor Who or Red Dwarf, or some other Sci-Fi where time travel is entered into the equation, I don’t have a great deal of love for blatantly ignoring anachronisms.* And this has got to be one of the most anachronistically unsound movies I have ever seen. Then again, these could be possible mistakes: nope, the documentaries on the DVD tell over wise, these are not simply overlooked mistakes, but blatantly ignoring historic knowledge.
To me it is absolutely absurd watching these animals roaming through fields of green grass, a plant life that wouldn’t exist for a concededly high number of years after their extinction. The BBC managed to find enough places with the right kinds of flora for the time periods they covered; and with a faction of the potential resources that Disney likely had.
These problems so far, are, I suppose, academic; others aren’t so easy to overlook.
One has to wonder who Disney was aiming for. It’s certainly wasn’t little kids, when I saw it at the cinema, a young kid in front of me was petrified out of her wits as the predator killed and ate its prey in the opening scene. Scaring children that much certainly won’t end in them asking their parents for related merchandise or return visits.
To me these powerful opening shots of the dinosaurs behaving like proper animals and the “journey of the egg” were the best part of the movie, then after the egg hatched, if you’ll excuse the pun, it all got completely scrambled. Because it gets problematic with the sudden, unexplained (not to mention anachronistic) arrival of the family of lemurs with really unconvincing fur and even more.
Action, action, action; at times this film is simply relentless. Then in others nothing happens and you may pine for those action scenes, at least until they return. There some pretty daft, duff lines and words here, the made up noun “Jerkasaurus” being one of the most cringe worthy nonentities of an attempt at humour I’ve seen in animation history.
The ultimate storyline has been done and done better in many films. In fact the main journey plot has been pretty much borrowed from Don Bluth’s The Land Before Time, only without the cute dinosaurs. There’s no way out of drawing comparisons with that film and to be honest I found Bluth’s dino flick more mature that this Disney fossil. Actually the stegosaurus character seems a little too much like LBT's Spike for comfort.
Stand together and the predators won’t attack you, yeah that’s a message that hasn’t been used before. And what do these “nature” films have against predators, yes they eat meat; it what nature designed them to do, but somehow this makes them fair game for villainy. It as if they have a choice in the matter, which, unlike humans, they don’t.
Another thing is the not quite “Romeo and Juliet” aspect of the growing romance that can be seen coming a mile away, the solution without doubt. What are the lemurs actually for, they don’t really get to do a lot of anything outside of comment about things going on around them, or end up being the ones chased by the predators; just what are they here for, apart from the setup at the films start.
A hacked plot, combined with uninteresting characters, broken dialogue and the occasional manic action sequence; it’s technically half live-action; and the irony is that it’s the live-action that’s the most lively thing here. The few minutes of the start are worth watching but that’s it.
Terrible.
*Unless it's used for comedic or as otherwise stated.