Dinosaurs

There is a moment during the opening sequence in Disney's new kiddie flick "Dinosaurs," as startlingly real computer-animated ancient creatures careen around lush vistas which open onto even lusher vistas accompanied by colorful swaths of heroic orchestral music, when you feel as if you have somehow magically stumbled onto the mother of all Discovery Channel movies, the one which will give you a real and true window into the past and let life shine on the screen.

Then the animals start speaking.

From that point forward, "Dinosaur" is another in the long line of essentially formulaic Disney children's dramas. The lovable dinosaur Aladar is a fish out of water who loves his adoptive mammal parents but still yearns for his people. A spunky, incompetent animal runs around spouting incongrous lines referring to things like professors which did not exist in 6 Jillion B.C. A dinosaur takes Aladar as his love interest after a few brief mishaps. Truly evil creatures, carnosaurs in this case, dog Aladar and his cronies at every turn with their gnashing teeth and unreconstructed predatorism.

And there is, of course, a message for the kiddies, which is that social Darwinism is wrong. (Really.) To make sure we all understand the importance of this message, Aladar must stand up to the evil head dinosaur who believes that the lovable but slow elderly dinosaurs should be left behind in the course of migration and sacrificed to the aforementioned carnosaurs.

No one does this primary-colors moviemaking quite like Disney, or quite as cloyingly. In all fairness, "Dinosaurs" is free from superpredictable dialogue, full-throttle political correctness diatribes and unthinking demonization of Aladar's opponents, and thus is one of the better-made kiddie flicks of recent Disney memory from a purely schematic perspective. There's nothing to make an intelligent adult cringe here.

Still, "Dinosaur" exists to deliver its visuals, which are simply stunning. Everything looks completely natural; there is no hint of unreality at any point in this movie. Hair blows in the breeze, droplets of water splash on sand, leatherlike skin undulates, mouths move with the proper range of expression, rocks crack open, all convincingly. Some people have called "Dinosaurs" a "Jurassic Park" ripoff, but this film's imagery is light-years ahead of that of "Jurassic Park." These images command attention simply because they are so completely convincing and at the same time so far removed from anything we might ever see. And these visuals are backed up by superlative sound editing and a sweeping orchestral score which serves the film without ever overshadowing it.

The visuals obscure some of the flaws of the movie, and make scenes which might otherwise be dull into real seat-grabbers. And when a scene is cool, like when Aladar must finally fight the carnosaurus, it is really really cool to see it on the big screen in glorious sound looking realer than most anything you've ever seen. The best scenes here are gripping indeed, scary and thrilling both for kids and adults, and this is mostly because of those transcendent animations.

So adults have sufficient reason to see "Dinosaur," in the form of its glorious visual treasures. These alone should make it worth an hour and a half of your time. However, what of its target audience? Seeing as how I am at least a decade too old to talk intelligently about this, I asked a cute little girl to tell me what she thought after the movie. Herewith, the text of our interview:

ALM: So did you like the movie?

CLG: Yes! [very exuberantly]

ALM: Did you think it was too scary?

CLG: No!

ALM: Did you like the effects?

CLG: Yes!

ALM: Was there anything you didn't like about the movie at all?

CLG: No!

Disney, apparently, still has it. Let's all thank our lucky stars they brought something real to the table for both kids and grown-ups this time.

DISNEY'S INTENDED DEMOGRAPHIC WILL BREAK YOUR NOSE

The interview was actually a little more interesting than this. It started before the film actually began. I feel the need to state at the outset that everything I am writing here actually happened. Four little kids in the front row were screaming for the guy from Mix 107.Threeeeeeee to pick them to receive a prize package, but the guy cruelly told them that there had to be parents and kids together.

Thinking quickly from my fourth-row perch, I rushed up to the front of the theater and said, "I'm their parent! I fathered all these children! Let's get some prizes!" This out of sheer altruism, of course. Needless to say, the Mix 107.Threeeee people did not think this was especially convincing, so we didn't get any prizes. I picked the cutest of the four children and told her I worked for a newspaper and asked her if she could tell me what she thought of the movie when it was over.

"He's big!" she said, pointing at her brother, who was indeed, um, fat. "He'll break your nose!"

Undaunted, I persisted, "Will he tell me what he thinks of the movie when it's over?"

"No!" she said, "I'll tell you. But we're not really sitting here, we just came down to see what was going on."

"Well," I said, "I'll be right here sitting with my sister. See her there?"

"You're her father!" she said. "You can break her nose!"

"I'm not going to do that!" I said, pretty shocked at both her encouragement of violence and her misunderstanding of relative terms but nonetheless wanting my interview. "I love my sister very much! I wouldn't break her nose! Now I'll see you after the movie, okay?"

"Okay," she said, and they all went back to sit with their mother.

After the published interview, the mother said incredulously, but in a nice way, "She wanted to come down here to tell you all that!"

"Hey," said I, "I appreciate it." But deep down, I was thinking: Why did this girl have such a fixation on nose-breaking? Was it her mom's fault, or simply the excitement of a preview screening? What if this becomes a major problem among our nation's children? Will we need a Million Rhinologist's March to confront the dilemma?

Sometimes I fret for our nation's children.

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