La grande marche des dinosaures

This dinosaur adventure is aimed at younger viewers (but not too young as the inter-dinosaur fight scenes could be a bit scary for them). The storyline approach appears to be borrowed from Disney, like the kind of films I remember seeing in my own youth where a cat, a (insert animal of choice) and a goat would team up to trek across America in order to find a previous owner who has moved house and reluctantly sold them to a cruel new owner.... or something like that. This time the narration focuses on Scar the vegetarian dinosaur who treks across what is now America but in those days wasn't. Meanwhile Patch the carnivorous dinosaur - a less appealing Velociraptor lookalike - stays where he is and learns how to survive in the Arctic winters.

The standard of the animation is very good, and is realistic enough for you to sometimes forget you are not watching a real documentary. Shame they couldn't have got David Attenborough to do the commentary, that would have helped. Stephen Fry is an adequate replacement though. Imbibing the dinosaurs with thoughts and feelings seems a bit forced at times, even though I suppose this was the only way they could make a good story out of it.

If you don't mind the predictable storyline and saccharine characterisations, this is a good family film.