Dino Time (UK Rating: PG)
This half term’s batch of family movies at the cinema is dominated by the latest from Disney, Tomorrowland: A World Beyond, with The Moomins on the Riviera as an animated option. There’s another one. A collaboration between American and South Korean studios, Dino Time looks likely to bring up the rear in the box office stakes, and is currently on selected release around the UK.
First shown in South Korea in 2012, it’s taken its time to get here, and it shows. There’s a slightly out of date look to it, with old fashioned mobiles, nothing in the way of tablets, and kids who are more interested in their skateboards than playing games on their phones – but its style is surprisingly western, with the slightly flat looking digital animation that usually characterises something from Dreamworks. It certainly bears no relation at all to the anime that usually comes out of the Far East and the fact that one of its directors, John Kafka, has worked on Disney animations for TV probably has something to do with it. That western feel is also helped by the voiceovers for this English version, provided by the likes of Melanie Griffith and Stephen and William Baldwin. Their names are familiar, but they’re hardly A-listers and certainly not recognisable.
Following the trend in current Disney movies – or, given its age, perhaps setting it – it’s cool to be a kid who’s into science. Ernie (voiced by Pamela Adlon) is into dinosaurs and his friend Max (voiced by Yuri Lowenthal) has an engineer for a dad. His inventions don’t work terribly well, but some of them are useful, like the retractable wheels on his son’s trainers and the jet-propelled skateboard he made for Ernie. When the two boys, and Ernie’s little sister Julia (voiced by Tara Strong), are playing in the garage at Max’s, they activate one of the inventions – a time machine that looks like a giant egg. It takes them back to the dinosaur age – an actual dinosaur egg has simultaneously travelled forward in time to the garage – so the trio need to find their way home. Except that a female T-Rex, who thinks she’s their mother, wants them to stay, a couple of nasty dinosaurs aiming to take over the valley are in the way, and the time machine isn’t exactly playing ball, either.
There are, of course, some inevitabilities. The mandatory comedy comes from the three blue birds working for the nasties. One has, to put it politely, digestive problems. It’s hardly original, and nor is the fact that they appear to be have been cribbed from the four vultures in the original Jungle Book movie, but they’re nowhere near as funny. Equally inevitable is that the children are a whole lot smarter than the adults, with Ernie and Max starting the time machine on their first effort, despite Max’s dad having been working on it for four years!
