Losing sleep over saurians? Fromage is back, baby!
Getting into the New Year spirit, I made the
decision to get a little more experimental on Fromage Fridays; broaden horizons,
try different kinds of bad, all that jazz. So when I saw the opportunity to
offer Fromage its first animated film, I more or less ran in blind. Not a
mistake I’d care to make again.
I’ll be honest, it’s been about 48 hours or so since
I’ve viewed “The Dino King” and I’m still trying to make heads or tails of it.
A Korean animated Children’s film known in its home
country as “Speckles the Tarbosaurus,” the movie follows the life of a young tarbosaurus
from infancy to adulthood, covering all of the love, loss, anger, hope, and happiness
that the titular character comes across before the Cretaceous period comes to
an end and history makes the happiness of his species irrelevant. Speckles
struggles with hunting for food and caring for his mate while constantly trying
to overcome his T-Rex predator, One-Eye.
This “Lion King-esque” story of a prehistoric age
can be all yours for the cost of your peace of mind for the first half of its
roughly 90 minute running time.
In a move that I can’t be sure whether it was intended
exclusively for English release or not, Speckles’ life is narrated to the
audience, forgoing individual dialogue in favor of allowing animals to act like
animals within an informed context. The results of this are a mixed bag.
While the nature of a dialogue light film full of
storytelling is always a welcome experiment in my eyes, this VO work would have
barely been passable in a flea-market mockbuster animated film. The young childish
Speckles’ voice is more grating than the sound of cat using a chalkboard scratching
post. My soul shriveled up the first moment he spoke, preying to any existing
god whatsoever that this would not last the entire 90+ minutes of the movie’s
duration.
Fortunately, he is eventually replaced by a more
mature voice, with delivery so forced and stiff I can’t help but picture him
recording half bored with his bland pandering material while fighting the urge
to laugh while doing so.
Some readers will probably predict the exceedingly
low budget nature of the film the very second that I mentioned that it was a CG
animated movie from a foreign country and you would be right as I simply couldn’t
let go of the feeling that I should have been watching everything playing out
onscreen with a PlayStation 2 controller in my hands.
To “The Dino King’s” credit however, the look of the
film, as primitive as the animation may be, does stay consistent whenever they
decide not to break the onscreen illusion with puppetry that makes Roger Corman’s
“Carnosaur” look dignified.
As cheap as the film was to slap together and as
terrible as the voice over narration is however, the unintentional laughs are
never really consistent enough and a sense of boredom sets in very easily. And
it is here that I am caught.
“Speckles the Tarbosaurus” was already a children’s
film in Korea but the lazy English voice work in “The Dino King” really feels
like a watered down version of something that was already lacking in complexity
to begin with.
This is sad because, the more I really thought about
it and looked it over, the more potential I see in it as a charming little
children’s movie that could have simply been dialogue free. With the right
marketing, editing, and production cues, the story had the potential to stand on
its own two legs without any spoken lines.
Despite the antiquated CGI and laughably implemented
practical effects, a lot of the emotional impact is actually really well
delivered nonverbally. Speckles’ sorrow over the loss of his family, his rage
against One-Eye, his peaceful demeanor with his mates and hatchlings and
everything in between almost had me choked up in ways that live-action movies
rarely do, if only they didn’t hammer it in too far with the narration of
people that probably thought that they could be doing better things with a
Saturday afternoon.
For these reasons, “The Dino King” has me split. I
have no desire to truly see it in full again and barely even recommend it to
anybody outside of people that want to show their kids something Disney-like
with a harder edge but for its sincerity and in many ways, success in
territories that triple A films can even fail at, I really admire it.
1½ Shatners out of 4
Bottom Line: A Fromage first in more ways than one, “The
Dino King” may work better as a family film than something to be ironically and
drunkenly laughed at.
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