We have a most puzzling paradox, really: Dinosaur would've been considerably less boring had it, well, allowed itself to be "boring"! It's absolutely absurd that they went through all the trouble of making these realistic, detailed dinosaur models, then completely ruining that by giving them goofy cartoon voices - to the degree that Della Reese's voice is goofy, anyhow. Um. Well, it's goofy relative to the visuals, anyway. If Della Reese really was a dinosaur, nobody would take her seriously, and Touched by an Anchisaurus would've been cancelled after just one season, instead of *consults Wikipedia* holy shit Touched by an Angel was on the air as recently as 2003? I like the stories about angels, unicorns, and elves, now I like those stories as much as anybody else, but....seriously, that's kind of sad, isn't it? When you consider all the amazing series out there whose lives were cut tragically short because networks don't get those young people and their internets, and then TOUCHED BY A FUCKING ANGEL gets NINE SEASONS??? Screw you, CBS, and your freakishly old audience!
Consisting of dinosaurs, you could say.
Which brings me back to the movie I'm ostensibly supposed to be writing about. *takes a deep breath*
Y'know, for as terrible as The Black Cauldron was, at least it still felt somewhat like a Disney movie, in the sense that it was animated in a Disneyesque style, and there was a stupid romance, and a comic relief sidekick you wanted to shoot in the face with some sort of period-appropriate projectile weapon. But Dinosaur feels....nothing like that - so you probably wouldn't be surprised to know that, for the longest time, it actually wasn't part of the proper Disney canon. Actually, Dinosaur doesn't really feel like much of anything. Hell, I can imagine hearing more realistic and compelling dinosaur stories (dinostories?) from hyperactive li'l kids playing with their dinosaur action figures. (Especially if they've voiced by Wallace Shawn.) Hell, little kids would probably come up with less wonky names than Aladar and Yar and Plio and Bruton and Kron and Ralph Zondag!
Of course, one of the fundamental problems that comes with making a film about dinosaurs is that everyone knows what a pathetic, failed enterprise dinosaurdom turned out to be! What with all the extinction and all, y'know. In order to overcome something like that, you need characters with actual personalities that you can actually connect with. Like The Land Before Time! The original, I mean. Though the sequels have characters you can connect with too, to the extent that one connects with a person one really wants to shoot in the face with a period-appropriate projectile weapon, I guess. Hell, that exaggeratedly dry educational kids' show that Robin-Williams-in-drag ends up replacing in Mrs. Doubtfire has more personality than this movie! You get the point. It's impossible to care about these guys on a personal level. And we all know what happened to the dinosaurs. It's not like Aladar and Company (a film whose theme song would, naturally, underline the fact that Aladar has no savoir-faire whatsoever) are gonna save the terrible lizards in the long-term or anything, so their story isn't interesting on an epic scale, either. It's not even interesting on a mildly-fun-to-watch-while-high scale, despite containing a meteor shower and everything! Basically, this dinosaur-themed movie ironically fails as far as any sort of scales are concerned.
But let's pretend for a second that the dinosaurs WEREN'T completely doomed in the near future anyway and this trek actually mattered. Is it just me, or is there a bizarre, borderline creationist undertone to this film's vilification of Kron? I mean, there's no doubt that he'd benefit from some anger management courses, and he needs to open his mind, maaaaan, and you catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar, and so on. (Though I never understood why I'd want to catch flies in the first place. I usually go out of my way to avoid them. But, that's just Jesse.) But, as far as this film is concerned, his biggest sin seems to be believing in the survival of the fittest, as though he were some sort of ICKY WILD ANIMAL or something. Fuck you, Darwin! And, honestly, shouldn't these dinosaurs consider themselves lucky that they're in his herd on their way to Literally The Only Place On Earth With Green Things Apparently in the first place? I generally assume that real dinosaurs weren't quite so egalitarian when it came to hangin' 'round with other species. Sure, in the end, he ends up being humiliated because his path is blocked by rubble, but it's not like he had any way of knowing that, to be perfectly fair. Dinosaurs didn't have 511, guys. Or any other sort of telephone-based anything. They didn't even have tin-cans-and-string! They didn't even have tin cans OR string! Given the circumstances, are we to believe that the nobler thing to do would've been to let the ENTIRE herd starve for the sake of a few dinosaurs who would've died along with them anyway?
Oh, and what of the carnivores? It's pretty standard for dinosaur-themed media to treat the meat-eating dinosaurs as the biggest assholes in the universe, because their consumption of meat was somehow more vicious than tigers or lions or dolphins, who are all just majestic and wonderful and perhaps even cute, according to hypocrites. But it seems particularly egregious in this, a film that prides itself on being relatively realistic, visually anyway, to paint them as inherently villainous simply because their digestive systems work differently from those of our herbivorous protagonists, especially combined with the very un-naturalistic morals about Kron's leadership. "Dinosaurs are awesome", this film seems to say, "except for all that nasty-ass dinosaur shit they insist on doing." Though, I suppose we can't expect scientifically sound ideas from a film that contains a lemur who dubs himself the "Love Monkey". Even if we accept the possibility that the lemurs had, indeed, evolved during the time of the dinosaurs - which, by the way, would place this movie pretty much right at the time the dinosaurs went extinct, so nothing Aladar does matters - there sure as fuck weren't fill-blown monkeys yet. Nice job knowing what animals would exist in the future, Zini! "Natural history is fascinating", this film seems to say, "except for all those FACTS and TIMETABLES. Fuck that shit."
(Oh, by the way, don't get me started on the Love Monkey as an actual character. Very rarely do I encounter film characters I want to stab with a period-appropriate piercing weapon nearly as much as I do him.)
This film's not even visually pleasing to make up for its stupid characters and its stupid story and its stupid stupidity that's stupidly stupid. Y'know what was cool about the co-mingling of live-action and animation in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and even Mary Poppins and stuff like that? They had no intention of fooling anyone into thinking the cartoons were live-action people, and vice versa! They create a decidedly incongruous visual effect when they're stuck together, and that's great, because the whole point was to say, "Look how odd and magical it is for these very different beings to interact with each other!" Whereas in Dinosaur, the filmmakers have the audacity to pass off these awful CGI beasts as an actual, organic part of these real backgrounds, and so they lack even a sliver of that same charm. Instead, I found myself keenly aware of the way they just didn't quite fit in, and the way their gross CGI skin doesn't seem to fit quite right on their skeletons, and it all adds up to be scary beyond all reason. If The Land Before Time is about dinosaurs' epic journey to the Great Valley, Dinosaur is about their equally epic journey to the Uncanny Valley, basically.
So, is it any surprise that this is now my least favourite D52 film? The Black Cauldron, like it or not - I didn't - is at least memorable. (Almost against my will, "munchings and crunchings" has weaselled its way into my snack-related vocabulary.) It's such a misguided spectacle that it naturally instils strong emotion in anyone watching it, as evidenced by my write-up for it, which was VERY emotional, in the sense that saying "fuck" a lot constitutes emotion. But Dinosaur? It's an even WORSE sort of film - the sort of film that is so thoroughly boring and so utterly bland in spite of all its stupidity, that you really can't feel much of anything towards it. You can deconstruct everything that's wrong with it - I tried my hardest here - but at the end of the day, am I going to remember this at the end of the year? Of course I'm not! This isn't worth remembering! Let's all just agree to forget this ever happened, okay? Okay. Thanks.
TERRIBLE AND WORTHLESS AND UTTERLY UNNECESSARY DIRECT-TO-VIDEO DISNEY SEQUEL CONCEPT THAT DESERVES TO BE WIPED OUT BY A METEOR SHOWER: Completely abandoning the seriousness and the artistic integrity of the original, Dinosaur II: Aladar's Incredible Musical Friendventure! is instead a lighthearted journey where our hero and his wacky friends embark on a journey with no stakes whatsoever and meet more friends and together they sing about the power of friendship and the awesomeness of hugging and the sweetness of sweetness, and honestly, this might be the one case where that would be BETTER than the original!
This was my first time seeing it too, and I've gotta agree - it is worse than The Black Cauldron. In the sense that, forced to watch either one again, I would choose TBC. I can at least have fun yelling at the screen and its nonsense in that case, whereas watching Dinosaur is more of a "tapping my fingers on the chair hard while exasperatingly rolling my eyes" affair.
ReplyDeleteWere you surprised to discover that one would topple the badness scoreboards as mightily? Do you imagine any of the not-few-but-not-many-left might sink even lower?
Don't you mean "exasperatedly"? Unless you're implying that it was your eye-rolling itself that was exasperating, to Amanda or something.
DeleteI was surprised, yes, in the context that Dinosaur is moderately well-received by professional critic-types, and I assumed I'd find at least ONE plausible reason that this would be so. But I didn't! (Then again....Roger Ebert just plain doesn't give less than three stars to any animated movie ever, because ooooh pretty.)
Of what's left, I'm honestly least looking forward to Home on the Range, though that certainly sounds like it has "yelling at the screen and its nonsense" potential. Atlantis: The Lost Empire and Treasure Planet have the theoretical potential to be as bland and self-serious as this one, I'd say, but....I dunno, I just don't expect them to be nearly as bad.
Fortunately, the next D52 movie is one I really quite like and think is underrated, if anything!