March of the Dinosaurs

We watched this last night & I found it to be a real mixed bag. First the good; the animation is terrific. The creatures, the settings, everything is done to a very high standard. Very impressive.

The bad? Pretty much the rest of it. Stephen Fry has a wonderful voice but I found his performance to be totally OTT; like a local am dram performance. Secondly, the pace of the show is s-l-o-w. They somehow even manage to make the chases and hunting scenes appear as if they're in slow motion. Thirdly, it's very anthropomorphic. Possibly, with the target audience in mind (14 and younger I'm guessing), that's the only way to do it, but giving a 3 ton dinosaur a brain tumour & making him forgetful?! Finally, there was no real tension at all. Having given names to 2 of the characters, it was clear from the second we heard their names that no harm would come to them, and it didn't.

So, for younger (or generally non-critical) viewers, this is a beautiful looking docudrama. For the older / more critical viewer, it's a lovely looking but slow, tension-free piece.

This motion picture is very beautiful. Every living creature in it is computer generated and, more than that, all the landscapes and pretty much everything in every frame is CGI. And since this isn't a big budget Hollywood production, the visuals are not exactly up there with, say, "Avatar" or "Jurassic Park''. But this fact does not ruin the experience whatsoever. Why? Take "Walking with Dinosaurs" from BBC, for example. The dinosaurs are either computer generated or animated puppets with "the strings" off screen, of course. Either way, you can tell they are not real creatures. They are fake, well done but still fake. It was obvious because the environment was real. And the difference between the natural and the artificial objects in the frame was very easy to see.

Here, since everything is artificial in the frame, nothing stands out as unreal or fake. It is all natural within the big picture. It is one with it. Yes, you can tell this is CGI. But for one thing, it is well done. And for another, there is something else at work here, something that makes this unreal picture very good. The light and the color do that. And I am not talking about how realistic the shadows are in the picture and how beautifully they play on dinosaur skin in the summer forest. What I am talking about here is how rich the picture is and how well-lit it is. It is very comfortable for the eyes to see.

And I haven't even scratched the surface of the plot. Most of the dinosaurs are in the big herd migrating away from the cold. But some are too slow and clumsy for such a tedious journey. They stay behind to endure the months of darkness and hunger. And some other dinosaurs are there to hunt, kill and eat the rest. All of them are given good screen time. Neither is portrayed as superior to everything around them. Some may be formidable monsters on the surface, but their strength is nothing compared to the environment that houses them and can cause disastrous events. This world feels real. It is big, it is complex and vivid.

The whole thing of a big group going from one place to another covering a huge distance with different obstacles in their way is, of course, nothing new. I have seen it more than once already. But again, there are different parties in different places involved. And they are busy doing each their own thing. And the plot carefully takes us from one location to another with enough time and attention paid to each. Everything is covered efficiently. Nothing is a waste of time. Nothing is boring. Everything is important and the big dramatic story is very engaging.

This dinosaur adventure is aimed at younger viewers (but not too young as the inter-dinosaur fight scenes could be a bit scary for them). The storyline approach appears to be borrowed from Disney, like the kind of films I remember seeing in my own youth where a cat, a (insert animal of choice) and a goat would team up to trek across America in order to find a previous owner who has moved house and reluctantly sold them to a cruel new owner.... or something like that. This time the narration focuses on Scar the vegetarian dinosaur who treks across what is now America but in those days wasn't. Meanwhile Patch the carnivorous dinosaur - a less appealing Velociraptor lookalike - stays where he is and learns how to survive in the Arctic winters.

The standard of the animation is very good, and is realistic enough for you to sometimes forget you are not watching a real documentary. Shame they couldn't have got David Attenborough to do the commentary, that would have helped. Stephen Fry is an adequate replacement though. Imbibing the dinosaurs with thoughts and feelings seems a bit forced at times, even though I suppose this was the only way they could make a good story out of it.

If you don't mind the predictable storyline and saccharine characterisations, this is a good family film.