This is not a movie review. You can go see what you like. Take your kids to what you think is best or what they want. I have few qualms about it. However, I will say that for anyone, any age, the more the movie turns you on and inspires you the better it is. Isnt that so?
I brought my older girl to see the movie Walking with Dinosaurs the other day from this writing. I thought it would be an animated documentary about dinosaurs. Or at least a half documentary with some sort of story to go with the documentary. Not so.
It wasnt a documentary at all. As a result, me personally, I was sorely disappointed and gave my wife the "eh eh, OK, but not really" hand signal when she asked how the movie was. Such a cornball story. A dinosaur love story. Phhhh, yeah, insert sarcastic remarks of any sort here. Why do all the animations have to have some "right dude" "dude, go for it, that's the ticket, dude" type of voice in their movies, for the main part or supporting actors now? What audience are they shooting for? I dont think under ten girls OR boys really get the "dude" hipster act. What happened to using Woody Allen s voice as the hero? Brilliant. Why didnt more animation movies use that scenario? After all, I think Woody Allen's voice is closer in tone and timbre to little kids voices. Or they can get a handle on it much more than a deep voice or a "dude" voice for that matter.
OK, enough dudes. So you get it, I didnt care for it. And I do love animation movies and kids movies too. Come to think of it, are there any animated documentaries? Now that would be a great category, a new direction to go forward in.
I couldnt gauge my daughters approval or lack therof on the way home. "Daddy buy me a potato chips"... didnt convey to me thumbs up or thumbs down. If there was some hidden message in those words, I failed to catch it.
However, that evening she started crying before bed because she wanted to pet the dinosaur with a hole in its head (the hero dinosaur loses a chunk of his head plate, triceratops, when he is a toddler dino). OK, she was a bit tired and you know what happens when kids are tired before bed, but this comment baffled me. It didnt help to explain that it was a movie character and she couldnt pet that dinosaur. I think she knew that and it was just the tiredness talking, but still, she wouldnt stop crying about it.
And then the next day she demanded we read her new dinosaur book. She got a number of books for Christmas and one was a second hand old book with great pictures of dinosaurs. In fact way back in time it was quite a best seller because of the pictures. Unfortunately this wasnt a translated book and the captions were in Finnish which is not a language I can decipher well.
Since then we have gone through that book three times and my Finnish is progressing and weve both learned quite a bit and my wife got another book on dinosaurs. This time the book is in her language and pop up. And there doesnt seem to be an end in sight in the interest in dinosaurs.
So get this, some of the things we have touched upon reading the two dino books: The dinosaurs were around approx from 235 to 65 million years ago, which brings in the concept of the age of the earth, that the dinosaurs lived during the time when all land was together till the continents slowly drifted apart, plate tectonics, and when the dinosaurs died out, either due to cooling temperatures or a huge asteroid hitting the earth with the subsequent rise of mammals, the concepts of global climate and evolution. Incredible. And for a five year old. She got inspired. I got inspired. I am quite happy with the results.
So, I totally missed the boat on the dinosaur movie. I obviously didnt get it. But she got it, and it was a force of inspiration. To be fair, or rather unfair to the movie, maybe it wasnt the movie but just a natural gravitation by many kids to dinosaurs. What under tenner doesnt or didnt have an interest in dinosaurs? Well my wife didnt but,... mmm, I wont continue. So I guess this dinosaur movie can free the latent love of dinosaurs that every kid has locked inside. That's worth a lot. You can learn a lot reading about the dinosaurs.
Now compare that with the Smurfs II movie my wife brought her to see a couple months before. Well, admittedly my daughter did want to read her book about Paris, the movie takes place in Paris, but it didnt overwhelm her. She knows a bit about Paris now, I think, maybe. Oh and that the Eiffel tow... no, I dont think she remembers that.
So I have to change my opinion about this dinosaur movie and give it a thumbs up, or at least say, it WAS an OK movie DUDE. Luckily my daughter realized that and got psyched. I would have totally missed the educational opportunities from this movie if she hadnt cried to pet the dinosaur with a hole in his head.
End note: Im still in awe of the fact that dinosaurs existed for about 170 million years. We tend to think of them as a loser species because, well they became extinct. But consider that humans have a three million year history since they came down from trees, six million if you want to stretch it to include some sort of ape human transitional period. 6 million.... 170 million, what a piffle species humans are. Not to mention that humans ll be lucky if they last for another 100 years let alone another 164 million.
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