You can ignore the troubled history behind this PIXAR animation (extended production, delayed release, replaced director, late changes in story & vocal cast) during its clever outer space opening where a formation of meteors jostle a giant one earthbound that just misses rather than hits the planet . . . DINOS SAVED! (So where are they now?) Followed by the film’s second good idea, a switcheroo on the expected Boy and his Dino story that flips into a Dino and his pet Boy! It’s all the other decisions that pull things down, starting with the design of our anthropological dino family. Mom, Dad, three kids (our hero is the just hatched runt). No one seems to have figured out how they should move, what texture their skin should be, why they are farmers. Farmers?! But since it’s PIXAR, Dad’s soon sacrificed and the kid goes lost, searching for a way back home with help from his new pal, a little lost early-human (fearless & feral). These two wandering thru a brave new world of primaeval terrors. (The film on the violent side for the littlest tykes.) Something of a visual triumph on backgrounds (landscape, weather, flora & fauna); it’s the foregrounds (action & characters) that underwhelm. (Save the sadistically gleeful pterodactyl scavengers.) Desperate for an exciting/heartwarming finish, the filmmakers borrow from the classics (a climax lifted from D.W. Griffith’s WAY DOWN EAST/’20; some sadder-but-wiser uplift out of Chaplin’s THE CIRCUS/’28). And PIXAR knew what they had here, burying its release behind their prestige release of the year, INSIDE OUT.
WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: For good, dumb prehistoric Early Man/Dino fun, try the underappreciated silliness of CAVEMAN/81.
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