Time for a little trip to South Korea, though this time we aren’t going back to the 90s like for Tyranno’s Claw, just back to the early 2010s, where after the success of a two parter documentary movie about dinosaurs in the Korean peninsula, Tarbosaurus: The Mighiest Ever, director-writer Han Sang-Ho decided – helped by Avatar making popular the 3D fad again – to follow that up with a computer animated feature film
I actually own the UK DVD release, going under The Dino King title, and at least this specific release has the english dub only on it, no korean audio with english subtitle options.
One of my few gripes with the movie actually lies there, as the movie opts for no talking animals in the Disney stile, BUT we have the main protagonist narrating over the events of his life, but in the english dub the voice for him as a youngling tarbosaurus (which is in the same family of the Tyrannosaurus Rex, FIY) has that “4KIDS dub of a toy anime from the late 90s”, like i’m fully expecting to hear a secondary dinosaurs explain some obscure effect of a Yu-Gi-Oh card to the viewer for no diegetical reason whatosver.
It gets better when we get to him having his adult voice, the performance still has that “english anime dub of the early 2000s” quality to it, but the first part of the movie is damaged by how grating, distracting and almost out of place the voice for “youngling Speckles” is.
No offense to Monica Taylor (a VA mostly known to american for voicing Ash and Delia Ketchum, in the Pokemon anime, characters from Slayers!, the old Sailor Moon anime, etc.), it’s just a confusing choice of performance that really does the film a disservice.
Also, dub aside, the “narration instead of dialogues” it’s a weird compromise in itself because its made to make it more kid friendly, a decision corrugated by the lack of much blood… but definitel not a lack of violence, as the movie doesn’t really pulls any punches: stampedes have dinosaurs plummet into chasm to their death, raptors drown in tar sands, t-rex start chomping into their prey, young dinosaurs launched against rocky cliffs aren’t miracolously climbing back with an unbroken neck or spine, when they just don’t die from fatigue.
Then again, i doubt younger audiences would have sit through a dialogue-less 90 minutes film, even with dinosaurs, and the narration serving to provide info about the dinos is written often more to be educational, while the designs tend to be quite realistic and lacking any anthromorphization, with some exceptions as in “color coding” (kinda) the main character and his love interest, and the velociraptor having funny mohawk-esque hair ruffles of varying colors being the most obvious one.
The plot follows the titular Speckles, a young Tarbosaurus with spots on his head that lives peacefully with his mom, brother and sisters, until a lone Tyrannousaurus Rex with a scarred missing eye, unironically dubbed One Eye, starting stalking them and planning to eliminate them to claim the territory for himself.
Speckles survives a stampede caused by One Eye, and manages to survive, meeting with a female Tarbosaurus dubbed “Blue Eyes”, with the two trying to mantain a territory away from the scarred One Eye, whom keeps chasing them, and eventually Speckles manages to fight him, win and avenge his family, while also having children with Blue Eyes.
But the end of the Cretaceous period bring with it quakes, volcanoes erupting, droughts, forcing the new family into an even more desperate battle for survival and on a voyage away from their old home grounds….
And it does tickle me how the story isn’t so much a Land Before Time, but curiously feels more like a Lion King clone script, because that’s exactly what it comes to mind after a while, The Lion King, so yeah, admittely the new title is both fitting and more appealing than “Speckles The Tarbosaurus”.
Though the many Lion King “references” (the scarred relentless villain, the stampede claiming the parent’s life, etc) are easier to overlook since – as noted before – there’s no real dialogues, the dinosaurs look realistic and acts like animals, aside from the “punk raptors” there’s really no anthomorphization at all to the characters, there’s no real comedy or jokey side because the focus is on the drama of these dinosaurs lives.
It’s actually far closer than what people wanted from the old Dinosaurs, the 2000 Disney movie, i mean, and the direction actually makes the drama work, even with the narration i’d wish wasn’t there, it’s quite captivating and grounded, even “mature” as it does not shy away from the heavier themes of loss, revenge and mortality and depicting them without edulcorating a character’s death for younger audiences, though i’m not entirely sure this was actually properly meant for them at first, but then again, with this type of narrative, might be.
It’s a quite enthralling ride even in spite of the 3D animation being not that good for the year it came out, it isn’t awful, mind you, especially considering it had a budget of only 7 million won, “only” as it’s a fairly big budget for a South Korean movie overall, but considering it costed less than 6 million dollars (according to a rough conversion), yeah, it does look quite good, and regardless the direction and drama will get you used quickly to the CG creatures and how they’re blended into the live action location footage.
Flawed and maybe not exactly for kids/family film, but still a good solid dinosaur adventure film with a focus on drama and with choices that will please many dinosaur buffs that are tired of talking tetrapods, one that was successful enough to spawn a sequel some years later, with The Dino King: Journey To Fire Mountain.
Wise Cafe (International) 