Yes, i did get to know this was ever a thing thanks to SaberSpark’s Youtube channel, i decided to eventually dig into the matter myself and do my own research, though it’s kinda hard not to step on each other’s feet, so to speak, when this one is connected to another infamous “target” for contents creators on Youtube, as in this is also by Colin Slater, better known for the christmas trashfire of Rapsittie Street Kids: Believe In Santa, featuring the meme gold of “Grandma speaking APYR”.
Because this is how internet legends are born, kids, though it helps when comparisons of your movie to Foodfight that make that mess look like a TRIGGER studio masterpiece.. ain’t wrong.
But does Promare have Mark Hamill in it? Didn’t think so.
Welcome to the super amateur hour, where shit that could barely pass as a college boy first draft for an animation in the late 90s is put out as an officially finished product, though both projects, Rapsittie Street Kids and today’s Dinosaur Island, both made by Colin Slater’s Wolftracer Studios, were considered lost media. despite Rapsittie Street Kids actually airing on tv. Even if just once.
Heck, the primitive 3D software used for making both movies, 3D Choreographer, was consided semi-lost, a software that unsurprisingly was never meant to make professional shows or movies, but basically just to make models to use in PowerPoint presentations.
There were sequels planned for both Rapsittie Street Kids (with an easter themed sequel teased at the end of Believe In Santa) and Dinosaur Island, but we’re left to assume that due to the overwhelming negative reception to both movies (both with a metascore on IMDB below the 2.0 out of 10) and overall obscurity, both sequels were canned, and Colin Slater never worked on anything else, but was kind enough to upload the entire Dinosaur Island movie on Youtube himself.
He also previously produced a short called The Norfin Adventures: A Norfin Noel (so the christmas theme was a kind of motif, in hindisght), and a feature lenght animated movie called Friends Are Forever: Tales Of The Little Princess, but his Wolftracer Studios films are his infamous legacy.
And keep in mind that his studios’ Dinosaur Island is the one with the higher metascore.
There’s actually not much to say about the plot, it’s the basic modern retelling of The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle and The Land That Time Forgot, heck, the 2009’s Asylum movie that combined the two stories (simply called The Land That Time Forgot, to make things more confusing) did the same exact prologue with the time portal, summoned/brought upon by a freak storm, bringing back in dinosaur time a boat with modern people (here on a deep fishing excursion), only to have them wash up on a prehistoric island full of dinosaur, wrecked ships from various time periods, weird manufacts and tribal natives they have to escape.
The same old shit, done very badly too, especially in terms of ending, which we’ll get to later, for various reasons.
Even knowing that Wolftracer Studio was a low budget studio, using an unwieldy software not meant to ever do animated shows and movies, even being fully aware of the staff mostly having to figure shit out on their own due Colin Slater’s not being much present in its role as producer, it’s hard to not immediatly vomit your eyes out.
I don’t care if you write “presented in Puppetech” off the bat in order to imply the stylization was decided and not just pretty much forced by the software they used…. this is absolute drivel.
And keep in mind that i wrote this review not so long after tackling The Flying Luna Clipper, which was released in 1987, so yeah, i’m not exactly on a “pacifist run”.
Sure, CG animation was pretty rough in the 90s, but Reboot came out in 1994, what is your excuse for this releasing a decade later and looking like it came from a botched student project cobbled together by a couple of 13 yo screwing around on the PC?
I guess very little experience on the craft by the team involved in, little money, and most likely – if what the staff itself said about Rapsittie Street Kids is also true here – any real guidance or help by the producer-director, alongside having to use software that you really shouldn’t but have to.
Even so, it’s so strikingly and obviously bad that it speaks for itself, from the low resolution CG models that indeed feel badly recycled from the ones for the cartoon delivery people in the legendary music video of Dire Strait’s Money For Nothing, the stiff animation, the crude prospective (when there’s any), the awful dialogue and the cliched characters, the character models accidentally replicating a “realistic manga eye placement” as their eyes factually stick out of their heads when looked at by the side, like they have the eye implants of Batou from GITS.
Either that or some Neco Arc -esque shit, again, by pure, sheer random incompetence,
Wolf Tracer’s Dinosaur Island has it all. Unless you want closure, but we’ll get to that later, let’s get sad by begrudingly having to admit that, despite it all, it still a slight improvement over Rapsittie Street Kids. Even if the character still not much move but “slide” or “hop” across the enviroments.
At least its awful nature gives out some hilarious shit like the lady survivor kicking raptors when the flare gun is empty, and other moments like the tree wedgie, when the combination of everything is so fuckin bad it’s genuinely laughable, and it definitely does a very poor job of ripping off its “source material”, plus the fierce incompetence on display helps to it being “funny bad”.
When it won’t just freeze you in place to which low of random ass racism the movie will randomly pivot too, with the tribe of “tiki people” that looks kinda bland aside from all having huge tribal wooden face-masks that make Uka Uka from Crash Bandicoot look like a progressive thriumph.
Then again, the fact that it makes slightly more sense and has some more effort put in than Rapsittie Street Kids while STILL being awful beyond belief…. makes it even worse in retrospective; ironically the slightly more structured and less random way it’s constructed makes it worse than if it was just a 100 % senseless trainwreck garbage can fire all the time.
Though, i will give sincerity points to Colin Slater for uploading this on Youtube and calling it “animatic with voice over and music”, because that’s exactly what it is, this is the kind of stuff that would be worked up to make it a proper animation short or film… but was released just as is, quite likely because of an absurd deadline of 4 or 6 months. Wouldn’t be surprised.
It looks like someone compiled all the story cutscenes from some obscure PC point n click/adventure game about dinosaurs done on the ultracheap to exploit the computer animation craze, but nope, no gameplay ever lost in translation here, this is all there ever was to it, 40 minutes of CG animation that was unbelievably bad and primitive even for a low budget animated film made for TV, even for 2004 this is appalling as a thing to be released on actual television.
I mean, this does look just a notch above the models in the original Alone In The Dark, which came out in 1992, i will remind you of that, so it’s one of those fangled “backhanded compliments”.
The only thing vaguely professional is the voice acting, everyone is clearly half-assing their performance, but still, it’s better than it deserves and it is the positive side effect of having roped in some notable names, including indeed Mark Hamill playing one of the 3 main characters, i’d expect him to play the captain character that it’s just in the beginning and then disappears completely, but nope, he’s in most of this thing, and like everyone else i will have to wonder how much he needed money to say yes to Rapsittie Street Kids and then this.
The only thing that stops it from being worse is that it barely qualifies as a film, it’s 41 minutes long affair, but even that doesn’t make things better when you consider that it’s really hard to stomatch even at this lenght, and all this short film its build up for a sequel that would actually complete the story, as it ends on a cliffhanger and then says “Troy will return in Dinosaur Island; The Lost City”. Which was – as i’ve already pointed out in the opening paragraphs – then cancelled, apparently due to the overwhelming negative reception of thi first Dinosaur Island movie.
“Apparently” because i’ve digged a little and found that Colin Slater did confirm to some forum users of LostMediaWiki that “Dinosaur Island II was 90 % complete”, which i can believe, makes sense they did had to stop with the company going belly up and all, and the first Dinosaur Island itself was considered lost media for a not insignificant amount of time, but with Colin Slater’s passing away in 2019, who knows if or when some footage of this allegedly incomplete sequel will surface. Heck, someone might have the file and be trying to complete the thing.
At the moment i couldn’t find any actual proof of this sequel existing in any form, and even if it does surface, i still think there’s the old valid lesson no one will learn from these situations: stop doing these cliffhanger endings when you barely got out of the door a couple of products that are an abomination to look at for anyone with eyes.
Regardless of quality, in these kind of businesses there’s never a guarantee you’re gonna do more, that a sequel it’s a given just because it’s cheap or anything, though it’s hard to feel some sympathy when they thought they could make franchises out of utter, bottom feeding garbage like this, because even if it wasn’t a sin against the god of animation, Dinosaur Island would be utter shite for the other reasons discussed, so yeah, voice acting aside there’s no “winning” or “not quite losing” of any substantial kind to be found in the carcass of this coprolite previously lost to time.
That said, i’m morbidly curious, so if the sequel emerges in any fashion over the following years, yeah i’m gonna cover it, you can be sure of it.
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