"It's like nothing you've ever seen before!"
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
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