Li Mu Bai: I've already wasted my whole life. I want to tell you with my last breath that I have always loved you. I would rather be a ghost, drifting by your side as a condemned soul, than enter heaven without you. Because of your love, I will never be a lonely spirit.
That phrase used to be fairly commonplace in movie promotion, but with the truth-in-advertising laws, it's rarely applied to anything these days. The fact is, after enduring decades of 3-D films, Sensurround epics, Cinemascope, gigantic IMAX visuals, digital stereo and even the short-lived Smell-A-Vision, most audiences can't imagine there's anything new under the sun.
But "Dinosaur" is truly like nothing you've ever seen before.
If your primary experiences with computer animation were "Antz" and the "Toy Story" movies, you owe it to yourself to take a look at "Dinosaur," just to appreciate how far this relatively new art has already progressed. You'll find a styrachosaur with skin that ripples, lemurs with fur that ruffles in the breeze and bloodthirsty raptors that move with an almost alarming dexterity. The action takes place against rich, vividly detailed backgrounds and it's followed closely by cameras that can effortlessly zoom along the ground, swoop into the sky and plunge into a river.
The fluidity and gracefulness of this work makes the similar effects in "Jurassic Park" and "The Lost World" seem almost clunky by comparison; there's even a none-too-subtle jab at Steven Spielberg's epics about two-thirds of the way through the movie. By the time "Dinosaur" offers us the sight of seemingly hundreds of homeless dinosaurs moving wearily across the desert in search of water and food, it's likely you will have forgotten the creations you're watching are not real, living, breathing creatures. The five years of work producer Pam Marsden (a Kalamazoo College graduate) and her team of animators have put into the film pay off magnificently: The illusion captivates us completely.
Like "Titanic," "Dinosaur" is basically a very simple tale made compelling by astounding technology. Since this is, after all, a Disney film, there's a hero who doesn't fit in with his peers (see "Tarzan," "Hercules," etc.), a character-building journey toward self-discovery (as in "Mulan," "Pocahontas," "The Hunchback of Notre Dame") and a climactic face-off with a terrifying villain, in this case, a savage carnotaur with a theater-rattling roar.
The carnotaurs and the raptors don't speak, but everyone else does, and the script sometimes strains to be reassuringly jokey, one of the film's few real weaknesses. On the plus side, we are spared any musical interludes. There's not even an anthem slapped on the end credits -- hurrah!
The plot of "Dinosaur" revolves around Aladar (voice by D.B. Sweeney), a compassionate young iguanodon who grows up among a playful family of lemurs after being stolen from his crib and deposited by a pterodactyl on a remote island. When his home is destroyed by a spectacularly rendered meteor shower, Aladar and the surviving lemurs make their way to the mainland and join up with scores of fellow refugees being led to a new nesting ground by the surly Kron (Samuel E. Wright) and his gruff partner Bruton (Peter Siragusa). Like some sort of prehistoric cult leader, Kron drives his troops mercilessly and demands complete loyalty, although his sister Neera (Julianna Margulies) eventually tires of his stern single-mindedness and opts to follow the more compassionate Aladar.
With less than 90 minutes in which to tell its story, "Dinosaur" zooms along, maintaining a relatively high level of intensity for a Disney drama. The vicious attacks by the carnotaurs and the raptors are guaranteed to get viewers on the edges of their seats and parents should be warned they are not entirely bloodless. Although "Dinosaur" isn't the relentlessly scary experience the last half of "Jurassic Park" was, the movie's PG rating is well-deserved.
The movie cushions the shocks somewhat with the comforting presence of grandmotherly brachiosaur Baylene, who speaks in the beguiling British tones of Joan Plowright, and her friend Eema, a styrachosaur with the earth-mama voice of Della Reese. When one of the lemurs hitches on a ride on top of Eema, she bellows, "That's just what I need -- a monkey on my back," and Reese's reading makes the pun much funnier than it should be.
What will rope most viewers -- especially kids -- into seeing "Dinosaur" more than once is not the humor, however. It will be the sheer spectacle of the film, the brilliance of the animation, the glorious, all-encompassing sound and the thrill of sitting spellbound in the dark alongside hundreds of other moviegoers while you discover a wondrous new frontier of filmmaking. Even with the best home theater system money can buy, that kind of excitement is impossible to recreate in your living room, and that's why millions will be lining up at their local theater to savor the "Dinosaur" experience this weekend. James Sanford
By : James Sanford
Source: rec.art.movies.reviews newsgroup
Rating: 1
Look kids! It's a really bad movie! If there were some way to weigh a film's quality against its budget, movies like `The Blair Witch Project,' `Clerks' and even `The Godfather' would score excellent ratings. On the other hand, movies like `Titanic,' `Waterworld' and `The Postman' would receive shamefully low grades. But those infamous three works no longer need to worry about being at the very bottom of such a list because, in one of the more surprising revelations of the year, Disney has dumped $200 million on `Dinosaur' – a truly wretched plague upon the silver screen.
Plot? What plot? Yep folks, Disney seems to have forgotten that they are what they are today because they used to be in the story-telling business. `Dinosaur' starts off with a semi-amusing storyline, even though it is stolen from another Disney film, `Tarzan,' (a creature born to and raised by the wrong species, in this case a dinosaur and some furry little monkeys respectively) but then the movie becomes more or less a tremendously oversized David Mamet play where the protagonists just wander back and forth contemplating life's issues. Now, this works quite well with two or three characters, a simple set and a highbrow audience. But here we have a whole stampede of prehistoric creatures, no defined setting (is the film in Africa? Montana? Earth?) and a target audience of tots to early teens. Imagine sending in the 82nd Airborne to work as meter maids in a small Rhode Island town - now you get the picture.
But hey, even when Disney fails elsewhere there are always those embarrassingly catchy tunes to keep you entertained, right? Not here. Nope, folks – the Mouse House seems to think it has outgrown Elton John. Big mistake! This leaves the audience with officially no pop-music salvation and only a mawkish score to distract themselves.
So at least there is $200 million worth of eye candy to stare at for 80-someodd minutes, right? Not exactly (do I feel like a Hertz commercial or what!). Actually, the 3.2 million hours of work, 45 terabytes of disc space (approximately equal to 70,000 CD-ROMs) and enough money to pay the President of the United States' salary for the next millennium accomplish very little. Steven Spielberg's `Jurassic Park' has better dinosaurs, Jerry Bruckheimer knows how to make a better chase scene and Joel Schumacher is superior in terms of manufacturing a scarcely-lit film. The prehistoric creatures, although obviously carefully crafted, look too childish and stereotypical - the good ones are smooth, the bad guys have sharp teeth and horns while the little ones possess hearts of gold. One early scene with an explosion looks like a combination of the bomb being dropped over Hiroshima and Nicholas Cage narrowly escaping being engulfed in a gigantic fireball. As for the seemingly never-ending thunder and lightning that conveniently roles around every time something bad happens, it creates more of an `8MM' type feeling than that of a kids movie.
Further confusing the target audience are a couple of very muddled morals. On one hand, the film earns major points for encouraging teamwork. On the other hand, (SPOILER AHEAD) the picture's hero will ultimately act alone, as his peers look on, to win the final battle of the film.
There is little doubt that Disney will recover from `Dinosaur' and once again find itself at the top of the animation kingdom. Actually, they already have a $75 million visual effects studio that was built for this movie but will be reusable for future projects. For the mean time, though, trust your science teacher – dinosaurs are extinct for a reason.
By : Mac VerStandig
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