BEFORE: Let's check in on my TV viewing for an update - I finally feel like I'm catching up. The original plan was to catch up on shows over the holiday break, but then of course I got sick. I'm caught up on "The Amazing Race" and "Survivor" for once, and I just watched the season finales of both "The Voice" and "X-Factor" (just in time for "Idol" to start again...). On my first-tier shows like "CSI" and "SVU", Fox animated shows, "Mythbusters" and such, I've just started the seasons, watching eps from late Sept./early Oct. And on my 2nd tier shows like "Shark Tank", "Cupcake Wars", "Little People Big World" and "Restaurant Impossible", I'm only about a month behind, watching eps from mid Dec. now. A couple of Saturdays in the office and I'll be in good shape.
Linking from "Alpha and Omega", TV star Hayden Panettiere carries over.
THE PLOT: An orphaned dinosaur raised by lemurs joins an arduous trek to a sancturary after a meteorite shower destroys his family home.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Land Before Time" (Movie #447)
AFTER: I hear there's a similar film out in theaters now, called "Walking With Dinosaurs". I feel no need to go out and see that after watching this. It's a little weird that dinosaurs have gotten lumped in with the "talking animal" films aimed at kids. At first I thought this film was going to be really bold and innovative, and try to tell it's story without having the dinosaurs speak American (which is weird on a few levels, if you think about it). The story could have been told just through growls and pantomimes, but then they'd run the risk of alienating the audience, who might find the story hard to follow. But maybe the audience needs to be challenged once in a while - how else are kids going to learn how to pay attention to things?
Storywise, it's another sort of quest film, with the dinosaurs having to move across desert terrain in order to get to their nesting grounds. So that theme sort of carries over from "Alpha and Omega", along with the knowledge that like wolves, lemurs have some very human-like mating rituals. Go figure. It's also a sort of fish-out-of-water story, as a dinosaur is raised by lemurs, much in the way that Tarzan was raised by apes (or Mowgli in "The Jungle Book" or Simba in "The Lion King"...)
The real standout here is the animation of destruction as a giant meteor hits the Earth - of course, we have no way of knowing what that would look like, it's all speculation. Who's to say it wouldn't look like the mushroom cloud of a nuclear bomb? I think the general consensus is that ash would stay in the atmosphere for a long while and block out the sun, but I suppose there's some artistic license in play. Also one would assume that the disaster would affect the entire globe, ensuring there would be no safe harbor anywhere for the dinosaurs, but again since it's a Hollywood film they can't really show the entire race getting snuffed out. Maybe I'm putting the cart before the horse since I already know how the story ends for the dinosaurs.
I feel like maybe I should have watched this with younger people, since my niece and nephew are dinosaur experts right now - over the summer they recited the name of at least one dinosaur beginning with each letter of the alphabet, and I think that takes some doing. They'd probably be able to point out better than I can that warm-blooded lemurs just wouldn't be sharing space with cold-blooded dinosaurs. They'd be millions of years apart on the evolutionary scale, right? Perhaps more research is required here.
Also starring the voices of D.B. Sweeney (last seen in "The Cutting Edge"), Alfre Woodard (last seen in "How to Make an American Quilt"), Ossie Davis (last seen in "Joe Versus the Volcano"), Max Casella (last seen in "Leatherheads"), Julianna Margulies, Joan Plowright (last seen in "The Scarlet Letter"), Della Reese (last seen in "Harlem Nights"), Samuel E. Wright.
RATING: 4 out of 10 pteranodons
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