Dinosaur (May 19, 2000)

When this movie started, I thought it was going to be a theatrical, animated nature documentary. I was dreading watching an hour and a half of silent, CGI Dinosaurs. But then they started talking and I wished it were silent. The juxtaposition between their realistic, nature documentary style, and their cartoony voices was disorienting and off putting. The characters did look very realistic (for a 2000 movie), but they did not fit with the backgrounds (which were largely live action, real world location, footage). The plot was a dinosaur who is raised by lemurs travels with a pack of dinosaurs to their breeding ground after the islands where they all lived is destroyed by a volcano (the plot sounds more convoluted than it is- it is really predictable and bland. The movie is more like a tech demo than an actual film. I understand the spectacle it must have been (akin to 2009’s Avatar) to watch Dinosaur in theaters and that is partly why it did so well at the box office. But the film does not hold up today and I feel it is one of Disney’s weakest films.

Final Rating: 2/10