Dinosaur

Review by Jason Gaston

 

Well, it's that time of the year again. Time for us to be inundated with a new line of stuffed animals, action figures, and happy meal toys. Time for the kids to scream and demand to go to one movie over and over and over again. That right, cats, it's time for Disney to unleash it's summer animated movie.

This year, the mouse factory has chosen to forgo the cute cuddly characters, song and dance numbers, and even traditional animation to bring us Dinosaur the tale of an iguanodon named Alasar and his adopted family of lemurs trying to survive on post-kick-asteroid prehistoric Earth. While the movie is visually stunning, giving us a beautiful look at a world long since lost through CGI characters on real backgrounds, the story driving Dinosaur is pretty much the same-old formula used in Tarzan and The Lion King... character looses family figure(s), sets out on life-changing quest, becomes a fish out of water, saves the day, and gets the girl.

Normally, that isn't a problem. I loved Tarzan and The Lion King ranks as one of my all-time favorite films. The difference between those two and Dinosaur is that The Lion King and Tarzan made the old formula seem new again. They did something special with it by use of good writing and strong emotional imagery.

We felt something when little Simba tried to awaken the fallen Mufasa or when Kala first held baby Tarzan in her hands. By contrast, when one of the characters in Dinosaur kicked the bucket, I didn't bat an eye.

Perhaps it was because I felt no emotional ties with the characters that die in this movie. Basically, if you're a jerk in Dinosaur... you're going to wind up dropping out of a tyrannosaurus's rectum in 48 hours.

Characters are static and unchangeable. Actually, I take that back... one character is dynamic but he ends up dying no more than 5 minutes after he sees the light, so what's the point?

Alasar is likable as are the cute little lemurs that he sees as his family. There's a funny triceratops voiced by Della Reese that steals every scene she's in, but other than that, the characters in Dinosaur range from uninteresting, to drab, to just plain unlikable.

Still, where Dinosaur lacks with story, it makes up for it in sheer visual splendor. It's eye candy, but it's nice eye candy... the kind that makes your eyes say, "Hey, that's good candy!"

Impressive CGI brings us the most lifelike dinosaurs that have ever lumbered across the big screen. Incredible attention has been paid to detail and it's evident when you watch the hairs on the lemur's faces when they talk, water dripping down Alasar's body, or blood glistening from a wound on an iguanodon's leg. Basically, if you liked Walking with Dinosaurs, you're going to go nuts when you see this movie.

If you're expecting another Lion King, stay home, but if you're in the mood for good scenery, go see Dinosaur. If nothing else, you can hear the most blatantly sexual innuendo ever put into a Disney movie near the end.

And ponder this: the only thing the Dinosaurs have to look foreword to after the end credits... is extinction.

Again, I'm not batting an eye.