Dinosaur
*
Rated on a 4-star
scale
Screening venue: Odeon (Liverpool City Centre)
Released in the UK by Buena Vista International on October 13, 2000; certificate
PG; 84 minutes; country of origin USA; aspect ratio 1.85:1
Directed by Eric Leighton, Ralph
Zondag; produced by Pam Marsden.
Written by John Harrison, Ralph Nelson Jacobs; from an original
screenplay by Walon Green.
Edited by Lee H. Peterson.
CAST.....
Voice of D.B. Sweeney..... Aladar
Voice of Ossie Davis..... Yar
Voice of Max Cansella..... Zini
Voice of Alfre Woodard..... Plio
Voice of Hayden Panettiere..... Suri
Voice of Joan Plowright..... Baylene
"Dinosaur" should be used as a test
for people trying to quit smoking. If you can survive it without a break
for nicotine, you can get through anything. For each of its grotesque 84
minutes I stared at the screen depressed and appalled, realising I was watching
something historic -- the moment when feature-length Disney animation became
a dinosaur itself, losing the last shreds of its visual imagination and
wit.
The company has been moving this way for years,
with movies like "Pocahontas" and "Mulan" -- good projects, but without the
sense of fun and commanding storytelling that has distinguished Disney for
more than half a century. "Dinosaur" is stone-faced, nonsensical, technically
incompetent trash, whose few moments of humour fall flat on their faces.
I don't get what it's going for -- its implausible plot shies away from history
to pander to the kiddies, and yet it's so slow and lifeless that it feels
like it's trying to be educational.
The film opens with a community of monkeys on
an island finding a dinosaur egg. (Monkeys were not around until thousands
of years after dinosaurs.) They choose to raise the young dinosaur as one
of their own. (Impossible.) When some young monkeys express fear of the thing,
their mother advises "We'll teach him to hate eating meat." (Uh,
huh.)
As a baby, the dinosaur, named Aladar, says "Googoo,
gaga!" and makes general human baby sounds, but that's nothing -- when he
grows up, he and the monkeys have heart-to-hearts, discuss chat-up lines
and crack jokes in sophisticated constructions that require an English
vocabulary. Later in the film, different species of dinosaurs, some of them
carnivorous, some herbivorous, all roam around in the same herd together,
and they too are able to interact. I'm prepared to accept that animals can
talk in the movies. This is pushing it.
Meteorites hit the Earth early on in the picture,
destroying most of the monkey characters, so the four survivors, along with
Aladar, join a march of dinosaurs who have also suffered an attack from the
skies and are roaming across the land in search of a new home. Aladar stays
at the back of the line with annoying elderly members of the party who keep
lagging behind and holding up everyone else. We're supposed to boo and hiss
at the leader of the procession, who says that if they can't keep up with
the pace, that's tough luck... but isn't he just being practical? Movies
used to portray toughness as a virtue. Think of "The Great Escape". Now,
it seems, you get to be a cinematic hero if you're a sissy whining on behalf
of two or three invalids in a manner that risks hundreds of
lives.
I digress. The above is not the most bugging element
of this movie; that would be the fact that the majority of the narrative
is grim, endless trekking across barren rock, by creatures who all look the
same from a distance. Much has been made in the press of the spectacular
animation, but I would seriously question the eyesight of anyone impressed
by these visuals. There are great elements -- in the early scenes, background
items such as grass and water are stunningly realised. But the animals seem
fake; they're seen in some sort of weird hypercolour cross between cartoon
and photography -- not looking real, nor like regular animation, they appear
to have been plucked from a Playstation game. Eyes are crucial in creating
the illusion of life; those in "Dinosaur" look like glow-in-the-dark marbles
that have been attacked with a florescent pen.
Who will enjoy this movie? It doesn't look good,
nothing happens, the only comedy is a few bad wisecracks in jive accents,
and it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Near the end I started chanting
to myself "Please comet fall, please movie end", but we're deprived of seeing
the dinosaurs get wiped out, and instead there's a voice-over summation where
one of the them wonders where their journey will end up. Sorry, dude, but
you're gonna get blown to smithereens. What a gyp.
COPYRIGHT© 2000 Ian
Waldron-Mantgani
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