Reviews for Dinosaur

I couldn't believe how much wasted potential there was for this movie. Disney originally planned to make Dinosaur a silent movie. Can you imagine how cool that would have been? But because Disney needed to make some money, they added dialogue (really bad dialogue), and made it kid friendly so the young ones wouldn't get bored.

I can understand the need to make a profit, but they completely ripped off the plot of The Land Before Time and added some of the stupidest words in movie history, namely "jerkosaurus" and "love monkey". Overall, the character design was pretty generic and the humor just seemed forced.

I will say that the animation and sets were beautiful. But when the rest of it isn't any good, I can't recommend it.

As bloated as its name suggests, this ponderous production is Disney at its most basic. Since The Lion King, Disney has gotten awfully good at following the same old tired conventions, giving us breaks only with Pixar's movies, Fantasia 2000, Mulan, and Disney's last two movies, The Emperor's New Groove and the tragically underrated Atlantis.

Dinosaur has no musical numbers, but it doesn't need them because it's still not a break from the stale patterns. It's Tarzan all over again. In fact, Tarzan at least tried to be hip and was mildly amusing at parts. Dinosaur doesn't give us that pleasure. The panoramic flyby of the herd of dinosaurs was breathtaking for sure, as was the descent of the meteors, but afterwards the movie becomes low on soul and turns into a patchwork of misplaced concepts and dialogue and misdirected scripting. The Land Before Time may have been more for kids, but the characters at least interacted with each other and grew as people. They fought with each other, not just with the villain, and they showed warmth and depth. With Dinosaur, it's a different matter. The characters have no depth or warmth. In fact, I could care less about them. They're not even voice acted properly. Having no personalities to begin with, the characters just play a game of "guess which actor I am". At least it seems that way.