When Special Effects are Not Enough

Tab, his mother, the boys, and I all went to see Dinosaur yesterday. Thanks to the relentless onslaught of Disney's marketing machine, we've been seeing previews of this movie for the past six months.

Last winter when we saw Toy Story 2, we caught the trailer for Dinosaur, which turned out to be the opening sequence for the movie: a long, wordless, visually stunning set piece in which an egg from an iguanadon nest is stolen by a predatory dinosaur, accidentally dropped into a river, swallowed and regurgitated by some water-dwelling creature, plucked from the water by a pterosaur, and finally dropped into a nest of lemurs. If you've seen that impressive preview, you've already seen the best thing about the movie: the realistic, computer-generated dinosaurs. Sure, the movie adds a few amusing lines of dialogue, but ultimately Dinosaur is unsatisfying.

The best children's movies have stories as rich and main characters as complex as those found in their parents' movies. Disney is often denigrated, but some of the best children's films have come from the Mouse's studio: Beauty and the Beast, Toy Story and its sequel, and Aladdin. A non-Disney example would be the marvelous, unjustly overlooked Iron Giant. When you strip away the fancy animation and the ear-catching songs from these movies, you still have an intriguing plot and characters who grow and change between start and end.

Dinosaur, sad to say, had neither.

Raised by lemurs, Aladar the iguanadon eventually rediscovers his own kind and helps lead them to their nesting grounds, overcoming an autocratic iguanadon leader and winning a girlfriend along the way. Is there ever any doubt that Aladar will succeed? No. Does his character evolve in any way? No. He starts off likable, brave, and compassionate and ends up the same way. Not that there's anything wrong with those wonderful qualities; it's just more interesting to have a hero with some slight flaw or weakness that he must work to overcome.

And what was the point of the lemur family, anyway, besides giving Disney another cute, furry thing to merchandise? Was Aladar supposed to have learned something vital from them in the years he was their foster son? If so, that point was not evident in the story.

Unlike their mother, the boys are not given to overanalyzing, and they all enjoyed the movie very much. So did Tab and his mother. I was the only one of our party walking out of the theater dissatisfied.

Tab took the boys to the playground after dinner tonight. When he came back he told me that a girl at the playground had approached Stephen.

"I know you!" she said. "I met you at Wegmans." Wegmans is the store where I like to shop while the boys play with other kids in the playroom.

Stephen and the girl then played together until she had to leave.

Tab and I both laughed as he told me this story. We've always predicted that Stephen would have girls chasing after him when he got older. But we didn't think it would happen so soon.

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