Dinosaur Reviews

An old-fashioned dinosaur opera, in the worst sense of the term... well, maybe not the worst, since they don't sing, though James Newton Howard's bombastic score occasionally sounds like they're getting ready to. In any case, this collage of characters and situations from THE LAND BEFORE TIME and what feels like the last hundred Disney features is the kind of kid movie that's too realistically violent for the 8-year-olds who'll be dying to see it and too childish for adults who'll have to take them. The story involves a herd of dinos, including an orphaned iguanodon (voiced by D.B. Sweeney) and his too-cute, adoptive lemur family (Alfre Woodard, Ossie Davis, Max Casella and Hayden Panettiere), who are forced to undertake a dangerous trek to the lizard equivalent of Eden. The film's only real surprise is that the much-vaunted special-effects work is shockingly uneven; sometimes the mix of live action photography and computer-generated animals is breathtakingly believable, other times it's about as realistic as a diorama at a natural history museum. None of that would matter much, of course, if the story and characters weren't so utterly by the numbers, the last straw being yet another plucky, comic sidekick — lemur Zini (by Casella) — who makes anachronistic jokes. On the other hand, casting the great British actress Joan Plowright as an aging brontosaurus is such a wonderfully nutty — if perverse — camp gesture that maybe it's churlish to complain about what's otherwise an obviously formulaic effort, designed more as a cash machine than a piece of cinema.