6/02/00 11:55 a.m.
On Dinosaur
The real problem with Dinosaur is a feeble story line.

By John Derbyshire, NR contributing editor

hat a star-burst of storytelling genius came out of England a hundred years ago! Writers of pop fiction — under which heading I include the movies — have ever since been mining the rich veins first uncovered by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (detective yarns), H.G. Wells (science fiction), and Rudyard Kipling (animal stories).

Dinosaur is firmly in Kipling territory. It is, in fact, a retread of The Lion King, which was a knock-off of The Jungle Book. I did not understand this when I took my kids (ages seven and five) to see Dinosaur last weekend. For some reason I was under the impression it was a sort of documentary along the lines of The Living Desert, but with the wildlife constructed by computer animation. I was therefore disconcerted when the creatures started talking. I knew from a TV preview clip that the movie included a giant meteor strike on the Earth, and I supposed we were going to see a recreation of the after-effects of that catastrophe: a nuclear winter, months of darkness as dust thrown up by the impact blocked out sunlight, the starvation of the huge creatures as vegetation died off under the darkness, the survival of small, agile, less food-intensive creatures — tiny mammals, which at that period, as I understand it, resembled hairless rats.

Nope: The sun is shining brightly practically all through Dinosaur. The little mammals are primates, which seems to me — though I confess I am no paleozoologist — anachronistic. (In some of the sequences they are clearly being played by human actors in monkey suits.) The only dinosaurs that die are a couple of mean old carnivores. At the end of the movie all the other lizards are alive and well, browsing happily in a lush landscape with the sun still shining bright above. What's going on? I turn to the official synopsis.

“Dinosaur is set in the twilight of the dinosaurs, when the killer comet arrives, and deals with the legacy they leave for the emerging mammals. One dinosaur who had been raised by Lemurs becomes a sort of saurian Moses and leads the Lemurs to safety after the comet ends the age when his own kind ruled the earth.”

Lemurs? Aren't we about 30 million years ahead of ourselves here? And if their age has ended, why do the big guys all look so contented in the closing shots?

Setting aside the fact that the mise en scène doesn't actually make any sense (a charge which can be levelled at a good many operas, after all), the real problem with Dinosaur is a feeble story line. It is, as I said, basically The Lizard King, with most of the same elements as Disney's 1994 super-hit. We have the cub (or whatever a baby dinosaur is called — I have ransacked Roget's Thesaurus without result) coming to maturity via a test of character. There is the contest for leadership of the tribe. There are the tiny animals playing mentor to the bigger ones. There is blushing puppy (or whatever) love between two young creatures of, one hopes, the same species. A great deal is missing, however. There is no character to compare with the deliciously obnoxious Scar; nor are the lemurs as likeable as Timon and Pumbaa. Given that they had decided to spend a bazillion dollars on animation effects, would it have been too much to ask that Disney hire a couple of decent writers? Perhaps there was no money left.

Kid reactions. 7-year-old: "Not bad". 5-year-old: Nnngh. (He lost interest halfway through and launched an assault on the Olympic fidgeting record.)