It isn't uncommon to find a movie about the past that depicts characters whose values are more suited to our present-day world than to their sandals and togas or their kilts and swords. Even more common is the Disney story that serves as a lesson for our children, a cultural guidebook that tells them who to believe in and what values really count. Disney's recent animated feature, already being dubbed Mickey's biggest failure in recent memory, both tells a fable for our children and imposes our modern outlook on the past with more vehemence than most. On top of that, Dinosaur goes about its anthropomorphizing, hegemonic task so poorly, it's no wonder the movie hasn't done well.
Some parts of Dinosaur are done splendidly. For example, the animation is splendid. While it isn't so polished as to be indistinguishable from "actual life," it is so seamless that one forgets about it rather quickly. This is in direct contrast to a film like Toy Story, where the animation is a thing of wonder and amazement. In Dinosaur, the animation tries to avoid being recognized as such.
Overall, I thought the atmosphere of the film was very well composed, with more environments than a George Lucas film. The desert vistas, with their craggy bluffs and dunes were particularly effective, as was the atmospheric conditions, be they lightning, rain, clouds, or meteors.
Harry Flugleman in The Three Amigos said it best when he said, "You stray from the formula, and you pay the price." Disney would have done well to listen to his advice when they were putting together Dinosaur. The most obvious mistake the creators of the film made was in trying to create the "cute things that serve as comic relief." Dinosaur tried to do this with the lemurs who, unbelievably, seem to be able to go days without water or food. The problem was that these lemurs just weren't funny. We shouldn't attribute my judgment of them to my adult sensibilities, either. I watched this film in a theater full of kids who weren't laughing.
The plot of Dinosaur has two levels, one which seems like an obvious lesson in "living in society" and the other which tried to be a lesson in actual Dinosaur culture. This second lesson, for example, includes evidence of the world-change that was coming as the dinosaurs ended their reign on the planet. A large meteor falls, quite spectacularly, to Earth, where we can presume that it began the dust cloud that wiped out the dinosaurs. Some species, already, are dying off, and the climate is changing. These are all interesting bits of information to include in the film, but they create a pall over the whole narrative. What's the point of the dinosaurs' journey to the "mating grounds" if they're going to be dead within weeks anyhow?
More fascinating, I would say, is the imposition of our modern ideals on the society of the dinosaurs. A common part of the herd mentality, and of the way the predator/herd ecosystem works is that a predator picks off the weak (read slow) members of the herd, both feeding itself and allowing the rest to survive. In Dinosaur, however, we learn that the herd is wrong to leave behind the weak dinosaurs.
A parent taking his child to this movie is left with an interesting conundrum. For one, in our society we want (IMHO) to encourage our children to learn to look out for those less fortunate, a lesson we learn from the movie. On the other hand, we also learn that the young know more than the old and that the new is going to be better than the old. Not once does the "old way of doing things" get reinforced at all. Pardon me if I "hrm."
In the interest of biological learning, however, what does a parent tell a child who asks about herd behavior then? Should a herd have a moral imperative to help its weakest member? Krol says it best when he asks incredulously, "What? Should we let the WEAK determine the pace?" Perhaps it is a sign of the new era that Disney movies have gone from Lion King to Dinosaur, from a clean, sanitary depiction of herd life to a vicious, dark, violent one. Whatever it is, I think I long for a day when Disney movies were more sterile, more cutesy, and so ideologically clear that it made the film analyst in me puke.