# Dinosaur (2000)

### reviewed by
Jon Popick

    PLANET SICK-BOY: http://www.sick-boy.com
    "We Put the SIN in Cinema"

Disney's annual kiddie-pic summer extravaganzas are usually pretty sure things box-office-wise, but Dinosaur is a whole different story. First, the Mouse House bumped up its customary mid-June release date for the weekend before Memorial Day. Then they hired a screenwriter with an extensive background in horror films to pen the story, which has resulted in Dinosaur nabbing an un-Disney-esque `PG' rating (the same as Woody Allen's film, which is being released the same day). Oh, and there's also the little issue of recouping the money it cost to make the film, which has been rumored to be in the $150-200 million range (it cost $80 million just to build the facility where the film was created).

Kids, of course, don't give a flying fig about a film's price tag. What they do care about is seeing cute, cuddly creatures with funny voices and promotional tie-ins at fast-food chains and toys that they can get their parents to buy simply by threatening to hold their breath until they turn blue. And I'm just not sure that Dinosaur is that film. Like Antz, the creatures in this film are downright unattractive, and if Dinosaur pulls in numbers much higher than its CG animated predecessor, you will literally be able to see heads rolling down South Buena Vista Street.

Dinosaur begins with the breathtaking ten-minute minute journey of an Iguanodon egg from its mother's nest to a tree inhabited by a tribe of lemurs. There's no dialogue for this segment of the film, which makes it even more appealing as viewers will be able to fully concentrate on the computer-generated creatures inserted over real backgrounds. But once the egg hatches, the ugly things start talking. The head lemur, Yar (Ossie Davis, Doctor Dolittle), sees the baby Aladar as a dangerous, cold-blooded monster, but he eventually decides to raise him like a son.

Flash forward several years, where Aladar (D.B. Sweeney, Fox's cancelled Harsh Realm) is now several times larger than even the largest lemur. He watches sadly as the boy primates and girl primates practice mating rituals, fully knowing that he'll never find one of his own to fall in love with. Then a meteor hits, and the world bursts into flames, leaving Aladar and the surviving lemurs to flee through a Nam-like flaming jungle, where they run into a herd of various plant-eating dinosaurs looking for a new nesting ground.

Although Aladar has never even seen another dinosaur, he gets to experience the full gamut of dealing with his own species, from bureaucracy (butting heads with militaristic head dinosaur Kron), to love (Kron's sister Neera [Julianna Margulies, ER]), to pity (by helping older, slower dinosaurs Eema [Della Reese, Touched By An Angel] and Baylene [Joan Plowright, Tea With Mussolini]), to fear (being stalked by two blood-thirsty Carnotaurs).

Dinosaur will be way too scary for some young kids (several were howling during my screening, and many families left early). Maybe Disney thought that the whole running-through-the-burning-forest thing would be okay because they already did it in Bambi. But here, it's more like Hell on Earth. And the Carnotaurs are a little too much. Dinosaur was co-directed by Ralph Zondag (We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story) and first-timer Eric Leighton, who previously worked as an animator on the creepy films James & the Giant Peach and The Nightmare Before Christmas. The script was co-written by Robert Nelson Jacobs (Out to Sea) and John Harrison, who is best known for his work in the horror industry (Tales From the Crypt, Creepshow).

Thanks to the cost of producing a CG film, Dinosaur clocks in at a lean eighty-two minutes and offers no superfluous plot. The voice work is merely adequate, with Marguiles, Sweeney and Alfre Woodard (Love & Basketball) particularly unstriking.

1:22 - PG for intense images and violence

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