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Sometimes things that are clouded with the nostalgia of childhood are best left in that hazy rearview mirror. Case in point, my recent reacquaintance with We’re Back! A Dinosaur Story, a film I used to watch relentlessly as a sickly youth. Upon rewatch, thing I had never noticed before (inconsistent animation, tonal dissonance, made-by-committee feel) were glaringly obvious this time around.
I remembered something zippy, energetic that blasted along its 71-minute running time with aplomb. Imagine my surprise to realize how incongruent Professor Screweyes’ sequence is with the rest of the movie, and how unnecessary it is. No wonder John Malkovich maintains a grand displeasure in even speaking about this film. To give wider context to his gripes: “Good ideas go to die in Hollywood. I worked on an animated movie about dinosaurs in New York once. It was completely bureaucratized. They took something that had art in it and put it in the laps of people that only cared about the bottom line and look what happened.”
This isn’t just a case of sour grapes, but a valid criticism of the final product. How else to explain the cutesy presence of Jay Leno, Walter Cronkite, and Julia Childs in a chidlren’s film. Gotta have something to make the parents chuckle! And there’s also a general sense of the interior logic of the film not making any sense. There are science-fiction elements involving time travel, dark magic and fantastical elements in a twisted circus, and a lone musical number because apparently animated family films need musical numbers.
If there’s no interior logic to explain the functioning of the plot and the world, which is ostensibly a heightened version of our own, then nothing in it really matters. Things are just jammed in to get from one scene to the next, and this does mildly insult the intelligence of the viewer, no matter their age. Then you must consider the sight of human character being turned into primates, the dinosaurs being drugged/mind controlled, and the villain being devoured by crows, none of which is reflected in that G-rating. We’re Back! alternates between silly and starkly mature sometimes within the same scene. I mean, I haven’t even begun to discuss the fact that parental neglect and running away from home are major plot points.
Yet a part of me still likes the damn thing, but maybe some things are best left in the warm embrace of nostalgia and not to be revisited.
