Dinosaur
The trailer had promise — more than five minutes of wordless imagery involving massive dinosaurs residing in their natural setting. Witnessing the beasts’ trials — escaping predators and foraging in their prehistoric environment — was as compelling as any Discovery Channel nature documentary. But the trailer, exhibited last summer before Disney’s animated triumph Toy Story II, was just a misleading tease. The trailer’s also the exact opening sequence of Dinosaur — ultimately the feature’s slickest and most entertaining aspect. Immediately following this segment, Disney falls back on a majority of its can’t-miss formulas. Apparently it’s hard to teach an old dinosaur new tricks.
With the stakes raised so high after such recent animated films as Toy Story II and The Iron Giant, it’s especially disappointing that Disney couldn’t have put the film’s estimated $127.5 million budget to better use. Instead, Dinosaur mixes state-of-the-art visuals with bottom-of-the-barrel scripting. The result is a joyless, mechanical exercise that lumbers to its inevitable conclusion. Thankfully, it’s the rare one among Herr Mouse’s recent cartoons to ditch the mawkish musical numbers. But the rest of the studio’s stock elements of the post-Little Mermaid era, from wisecracking sidekicks to ubiquitous parental figures, conveniently find a home in the Cretaceous period.
“Some things start out big. And some things start out small. But sometimes the smallest thing can make the biggest difference,” the opening narration explains. And in this instance the “small” refers to a soon-to-be hatched egg that will mature into an iguanodon named Aladar. As in the trailer, the film follows the egg as it moves from peril to safety, first at the expense of a hungry carnotaur, then down a river, floating like an infant Moses, then in the beak of a swooping pteranodon. Eventually, the Tylenol-caplet-shape egg lands among some warm-blooded lemurs — the writers take a few necessary liberties with mammal/dinosaur coexistence. When baby Aladar (voiced by D.B. Sweeney) is hatched, it is adopted by this clan of primates and grows up to be their five-ton protector.
After a meteor shower decimates the fertile landscape and food supply, Aladar and the remaining lemurs find themselves on a quest for the “nesting grounds.” They join a herd of migrating dinosaurs of various types and sizes, including a mannered brachiosaur (Joan Plowright) and a down-to-earth styrachosaur (Della Reese). Aladar becomes smitten with a fellow iguanodon, Neera (Julianna Margulies), whose ruthless brother, Kron (Samuel E. Wright), is shepherding the cluster to the point of exhaustion.
Sure, some moments in Dinosaur tug at the emotions. These mostly involve the usual Disney sentiment (see The Lion King or Mulan) of how one determined individual can make a difference. What nullifies any type of prolonged interest in the proceedings, though, is that whenever Aladar has a conflict (physical or ideological) with an enemy, the rival dies, even if the creature seems to be having a change of heart as the result of the noble dinosaur’s behavior. It would be considerably more interesting if the adversary (any of them) were to live and, thus, deal with the consequences of his or her actions.
Also, why are some of the dinosaurs anthropomorphized characters and others shown as, well, dinosaurs? The predatory carnotaurs and velociraptors are mute reptiles. One of the members of the herd, Url the ankylosaurus, has the personality of a puppy. It even carries around a stalagmite like a stick for fetching. That might make sense on The Flintstones, but it puts a granite wedge into the continuity of this story. And, as if last summer’s fallout from the depiction of Jar Jar Binks weren’t enough of a lesson, the filmmakers chose to have black actors (Ossie Davis and Alfre Woodard) provide the voices of the main “monkeys.” This doesn’t sit well when so much of the lemurs’ dialogue revolves around such infuriating lines as “Make way for the love monkey.”
It’s obvious that the majority of the filmmakers’ efforts was spent crafting Dinosaur‘s visual elements. The animators certainly nail the physical details — the melding of the dinosaurs with natural settings, such as streams and forests, is particularly majestic, as are the close-ups of the prehistoric creatures’ skin and musculature. But in 10 years, when the technical marvels will have faded to the point that the animation looks as crude as The Rescuers Down Under, the story is all that will remain to attract audiences. At times, the sketchy script for Dinosaur makes The Lost World look deep.
If only the filmmakers had chosen to go completely in the direction of the stirring trailer by eliminating talking, humanlike dinosaurs and crafting an 82-minute wordless piece. That might have offered a fresh injection of life into this animated blockbuster. The absence of monkey puns alone would have elevated it to the Paleocene level. (PG) Rating: 4
