Enough of these dinosaur films with no goddamn budget, and enough with any semblance of sensitivity, we’re going Disney.
Old school live action Disney, with One Of Our Dinosaur Is Missing, the penultimate film directed by Robert Stevenson for Disney, and one of his last movies, after the success he brought to the company by directing well loved (and successful) films like the Herbie movies, The Love Bug, and more importantly Mary Poppins and Bedknobs And Broomsticks.
Yeah, we’re not doing such obscure and cheap ass dinosaur films made by some randos in his garage for 20 bucks, for a change.
That said, this i feel it’s a forgotten film by Stevenson… and it’s most likely also bound to never show up again anywhere, especially on Disney +, if the spineless rats never managed to find some backbone and put Song Of South on there, this one ain’t gonna fly either, for similar reasons.
Loosely based on the novel “The Great Dinosaur Robbery” (and with the title parodying One Of Our Aircrafts Its Missing, a 1942 British propaganda film directed by Michael Powell), One Of Our Dinosaur Is Missing tells the comedic tale of a Western spy stealing a microfilm (allegedly containing a secret formula dubbed “Lotus X”) from China, hiding it in the skeleton of a brontosaurus shipped to a museum, and so the hunt is on, with Chinese spies and even British car jacking nannies (cue the UK hilarity) get involved in the “fossil fray”.
Yeah, given the decade it was released, the subject matter and the fact that Chinese spies are involved… will force me to use a lot of quotation mark around “Chinese”.
I do like the stylized “cut out style” opening animation, shame even that is put to the “yellowface sounds” with the stereotyped bytonal scale stuff (the music is otherwise quite decent for the type of film it is) and there’s really no escaping the blatant racism that’s exactly what you’d think it would be, with british actors with fake ass mustaches, slanted eyes and comedy accents.
Look, i can’t spend the entire review pointing out the yellowface bullshit (the fact the only Chinese actor, Victor Wong, is actually uncredited says it all), unsurprising many Asian advocacy groups – rightfully- lamented this shit when the movie released, alongside shit like the last remnants of the Charlie Chan movie series and the Fu Manchu one, speaking of old relics from a bygone age that still peddled the “yellow peril” crap. And didn’t know crap about paleonthology, as well, even though the dinosaur skeleton props look fairly good.
Regardless, even if not irked by it, there’s no denying it dates the movie terribly, and here’s the part where i say that this is not even the worst issue… but honestly it arguably even worse than Song Of The South, since the racism and stereotypes are so relentless it feels like a joke, heck, the premise of “british squad of nannies vs evil chinese spies” sounds like the Hell Grannies sketch from Monty Python’s Flying Circus, but this feel like the scraps thrown out, the discarded first drafts that never had a joke wrote around the idea itself, as it’s sure a family film, a whimsy farce made for the whole family as a spy caper thingie, but it’s not funny, nor compelling.
Because even if you’re willing to gloss over the yellowface crap, One Of Our Dinosaur Is Missing is ultimately dull, with middling slapstick at best, an incredibly padded narrative (the main chase scene just goes on and on and on), it feels and is from a time where the company fell into a general slump, here wasting talented actors and directors into a barely mediocre but hyper racist affair full of charicatures, and even some moments of self-awareness with the British steoreotypes aren’t enough to gloss over how much the movie overdoes on the “yellowface” crap to the point it drowns the few good ideas it has, or characters that are actually that and not stereotypes (which also include British and even American ones) but don’t get any space to get fleshed out, we gotta have Peter Ushinov as a cowardly “chinese spy general” that trembles at the main nanny because he was raised in the UK by her, whom also nicknamed him “Panda Nose”.
If this does eventually get a Disney + rerelease (it won’t) and it’s not completely awful, the music is still quite nice even if too embued with chinese stereotype, the dinosaur skeleton looks quite good, but honestly i still don’t recommend it unless you’re doing a Disney live-action retrospective, and even so, you’ll find that the film does deserve its obscurity.
Even fully aware this might be interpreted as a monkey paw’s wish, i do believe the idea would made for a better amusement park ride more than the movie we got.
Wise Cafe (International) 