Walking with Dinosaurs (2013)

Walking with Dinosaurs arrives with an unusually heavy paper trail for a children's film about a small horned lizard. It began as an extension of the BBC's nature programming, financed independently at roughly eighty million dollars by Reliance and IM Global, shot in Alaska and New Zealand for their Cretaceous-adjacent light, and animated by Animal Logic in consultation with actual palaeontologists. Then Fox executives watched a rough cut and decided the children would not connect without voices. The finished article is a silent natural history piece wearing a borrowed coat of narration, and the coat does not fit.

The social content here is thin and unbothered. John Leguizamo and Tiya Sircar lend their voices to the Cretaceous cast, and Karl Urban stands around in the live-action bookends with two child actors, but the arrangement is ordinary ensemble staffing. Nobody is making a point. The female Pachyrhinosaurus, Juniper, exists to be competed over by two brothers, and the film never pauses to interrogate the herd's succession of bullies and strongmen. Patchi is the runt of the litter, which sets up a conventional underdog arc about courage. His smallness is a plot device, not a thesis about accepting the body you were issued.

There is also, refreshingly, no sermon. A forest fire and a warmer Cretaceous serve as weather and obstacle. No one mentions emissions. The migration is not an allegory for anything economic, and the Gorgosaurus pack is not a stand-in for the one percent. Racial themes are absent by definition, since the cast is largely computer-generated and the human frame story concerns a fossil dig. The entire enterprise was designed to be watched with the sound off, and it shows. A dinosaur film that asks nothing of its audience beyond mild suspense and a returned tooth is a rare specimen in this climate. We record it, dryly, as such. Thematic tags: none apply. It is not a sequel, not a remake, not a superhero picture, not based on a book, and it won nothing.