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Dinosaur is a Dino-snore. Despite a budget of reportedly US$200 million and
boasting some eye-popping visuals, Walt Disney's latest animated feature is
a boring, lifeless feature that will probably have very little appeal to anyone old
enough to spell the word "dinosaur".
The film is set approximately 65 million years ago during the Cretaceous
period, late in the game for the dinosaur species. As the film opens, we
witness the long journey of a large egg as it is picked from its mother's
nest and transported to a far away island. It lands in the hands of a family
of monkey-like creatures named Lemurs, led by the patriarch Yar (Ossie
Davis). Despite his protests and fears of taking care of a meat-eater, Yar
and his family take the foreign creature, an Iguanodon that will be known as
Aladar, as one of their own family members (wouldn't Tarzan have been a
better name?).
All seems like paradise for Aladar and his Lemur family for a while, that is
until a massive meteor show nearly wipes everyone out. They do manage to
escape, but their home is destroyed. So begins the long journey to find a
new home, one that has the group meeting up with a herd of migrating
dinosaurs.
In true Disney fashion, there are nice ones, a romantic interest
for the film's hero and a jerk that challenges the hero and learns the hard
way that he was wrong about Aladar all along. Aside from the arrogant one
(who is actually the herd's leader), the group also encounters vicious
raptors and carnotaurs (who are a variation on the Tyrannosaurus Rex) while
they search for their new home.
All standard, all done before and done better. It doesn't take a brain
surgeon or even a well-versed film viewer to pick out all of the other
films, Disney or otherwise, that Dinosaur rips off. Be it Tarzan, The Lion
King or The Land Before Time, the screenplay is the worst one attached to a
Disney animated feature in a long, long time (yes, even lamer than
Pocahontas).
The characters are underdeveloped and clichéd; the jokes are
weak, the film's moral message is delivered with all the subtlety of a train
wreck and the situations that comprise the plot are without any sort of
motivation or energy. There are villains that lack a sense of menace, a love
interest that never develops anything to make us believe that the two
dinosaurs would fall in love with each other and a Lemur mating ritual that
had my friend and I scratching our heads, wondering exactly what part of
Walt Disney's frozen body the filmmakers were smoking when they came up with
that sequence. Even the voice cast, which includes DB Sweeney, Julianna
Margulies and Ossie Davis, can't do much to liven things up.
So, is there anything of worth in this marketing campaign
disguised as a summer blockbuster? Well, there are the visuals. The blending
of computer-animated dinosaurs and real-life backgrounds is quite an
impressive accomplishment, and the meteor shower that nearly wipes out our
heroes in the beginning of the film is almost worth the price of admission.
However, the visuals (and a strong orchestral score by James Newton Howard)
can only carry a film so far, and after about thirty minutes, that stink
cloud of a plot begins to ruin even that.
Animated features from Disney Pictures, despite their massive waves of
merchandising tie-ins and hype, usually deliver the goods when it comes
right down to whether or not the films are worth all the sound and fury.
Dinosaur is the first case where this is not the case. Several reviewers have suggested that
hand-drawn animation may soon become extinct. I disagree. The only thing in
danger of becoming extinct thanks to films like Dinosaur is quality
filmmaking.
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