Walking with Dinosaurs 3D

I'll be short: Great 3d animation wrapped around a stupid script that even kids found to be idiotic. There... I was a big fan of the show, and had great expectations about this movie. After seen "land before time" and "dinosaur" I expected this movie to raise the bar, both technically and in the narrative department. Wrong. The animation is top notch, not discussion, even better that "dinosaur" that was very good already, but when it came to the screenplay, and those dialogs, man, that was painful to watch. I mean, I saw kids yawning in the theater. A story may be simple, but never boring. Dialogs may be sparse, but entertaining or funny. The dialogs here where just plain dumb, boring and cliché. 5 out of 10 for me.

Very nice animation but this is for very small children. The dialogue is inane. There's upbeat fluffy songs. There are even poop jokes. It's pretty juvenile stuff. The voice actors are annoying, particularly John Leguizamo. That doesn't surprise me as he is one of the worst people pretty much ever. I agree with another reviewer who said they should have made it without the animals talking or think-talking. It would have worked much better and might have appealed to a broader audience than those still wearing diapers. I'm surprised they put so much effort into the animation just to make something so slight. If you have little kids or if you have suffered a concussion recently, this is an innocuous little picture you might enjoy. The rest of you, try to watch it with the sound off.

The film Walking with Dinosaurs has tremendous potential. It tells the story of Patchi (Justin Long) a Pachyrhinosaurus as he struggles to make his way in the dinosaur world. Patchi is brave and kind and despite being the runt of the litter has an incredible knack of survival in an extremely treacherous environment. The digital animation for this film is second to none and the dinosaurs are literally brought to life right in front of the screen. We saw it in 2d and it did not make much difference. My two and four year old loved it and I think a little boy obsessed with dinosaurs would love it even more. I was a little disappointed with the script finding it clichéd and predictable at times. Some stories lacked development but it did give me an hour and a half of rest whilst my girls sat enthralled. It's not a bad way to spend an afternoon.

The overall story is one of a misfit runt overcoming obstacles as he grows up. We've seen the story before, nothing new. CGI is impressive and they even had enough sense to include footprints the dirt, so it seems more like the dinos are grounded, more real. It was hard to tell if the background was CGI or real life film w/ dinos added. The studio decided to frame the dino story with a modern day teenager not wanting to see his uncle in Alaska. Totally unnecessary, didn't need it, wasted time. Each time a new dinosaur entered the story, the movie did a freeze frame, the dinos name and an explanation of the name was give. Very disrupting. Then the dinos would use that name to refer to that dino-as if we would call each other Homo Sapien. A lot of the dialog was a bit too cute with references back to the modern world. I took my kid, he liked it, but that was probably because it was a movie about dinosaurs regardless of content. I found it mildly annoying. Strickly kids fare.

In this movie, the dinosaurs talk, and it's so weird when compared to the hyper-realistic CGI. This film also has very unfitting music. If you removed the voiceovers and replaced the music, this would be an actually good film. If I ever rewatch this movie, I'm gonna have to remove the audio, replace the music and sound effects, and remove the scenes with the humans, and the paleontological analysis scenes. And yes, there's a version called "The Cretaceous Cut", which removes the dialog and human scenes, but it still has the unfitting music and paleontological analysis scenes.