Dinotasia Blu-ray Review
A new theory of extinction.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, November 20, 2012
There's a certain segment of the population who believes one of two widely discredited ideas. The first of these is that all
fossil evidence of bygone species like dinosaurs is "fake", put there by some sort of Grand Deceiver Divinity to lure us into
some sort mistaken belief that these species did in fact exist (why any God worth His or Her salt—pillar or otherwise—
would
want to do this is never really fully explained by many of these folks). Another equally discredited idea is
that, yes, those huge dinosaur beasts
did roam the Earth, but since the Earth is only a few thousand years old
according to (widely disparaged) attempts to calculate its age by the "begats" in certain Biblical verses, then it's intuitively
obvious that Man and Dinosaur co-existed during the same era. Since the first set of people believe dinosaurs were a
hoax, the evident demise of the species is a non issue, but for those in the second camp, I'd like to propose an exciting
new alternative theory that completely takes into account the cohabitation of Man and Dinosaur, namely that the poor,
hapless beasts were doomed by Werner Herzog's narration on
Dinotasia. Herzog, certainly one of the oddest
directors to ever hit the big time, introduces each segment of this haphazard assortment of scraps from another Discovery
channel series called
Dinosaur Revolution with some hilariously flowery language and supposedly piquant
commentary that may in fact lead some viewers to laugh out loud.
There's a certain irony in that old phrase "the circle of life", because what it seems to
really refer to is the circle
of
death, and that seems to be the overweening focal point of much of
Dinotasia. Dinosaurs evidently did
not
suffer fools gladly, especially other foolish dinosaurs that had the temerity to, say, howl (or whatever it is that
dinosaurs
did) at the moon.
Dinotasia plays out in a number of short episodes that basically boil down to one species
trampling, chewing or otherwise decimating one another. Oh, and of course, we get some hilariously poetic musings
from
Mr. Herzog, all in his inimitable (and extremely thick) accent.
Audiences have become so used to stellar CGI these days that anything less than top flight quality is usually met with
critical brickbats. Rather incredibly, the original series that
Dinotasia is more or less left over from (
Dinosaur
Revolution), took upwards of three years to produce, and yet the animation here is shockingly disparate in quality,
perhaps at least somewhat due to the fact that these
are in fact "leftovers" that were never aired in the actual
series. Some elements, typically the dinosaurs more on the bird side of the equation, look pretty good, if occasionally
ridiculously close to what someone like Chuck Jones or Tex Avery might come up with after a bit of a bender. But some
of the more "traditional" behemoths look frankly ludicrous some of the time, something that works consistently against
this being anything other than comedy relief.
The keepcase insert has a very telling comment, namely "the depictions combine the latest scientific thinking with
stories crafted in a purely visual style not seen since the classic era of silent cinema". Let's just jettison the second half
of that statement as press agent hype, but that "latest scientific thinking" element is really interesting. Do scientists
really know what sounds some of these creatures made, specifically the almost human mewing that some young
dinosaurs make in various episodes here when, for example, they're separated from their parents or are mortally
wounded? And is there some archeologist or paleontologist out there insisting that a hapless mother dinosaur would
go decapitate a noisy neighbor so that she could get a little shuteye with her sweet offspring napping nearby?
Dinotasia is probably best seen as a sort of high tech cartoon than for any ostensible educational value. Over
and over again, we get some fanciful narrative introduction by Herzog, followed by dinosaurs killing each other. Okay,
we get it: these were not fuzzy little pets that you'd want to snuggle up with. But certainly something more insightful
could have been imparted here. What it looks like more than anything is that the producers of
Dinotasia (a
consortium with the wonderful moniker Creative Differences) wanted to maximize their investment by not letting any
scraps go to waste. But what is repeatedly apparent throughout this haphazard mélange is that stuff was left on the
cutting room floor for a good reason.
Dinotasia Blu-ray, Video Quality
Dinotasia is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Flatiron Films and New Video with an AVC encoded 1080i transfer in
1.78:1. This is one of the most schizophrenic looking high definition presentations in recent memory, one which ping pongs
back and forth between crystalline clarity and awesome sharpness to muddy softness and murkiness compounded with
aliasing that at times looks like it's actually built into the less than stellar CGI rather than the result of any compression
artifacts. A lot of
Dinotasia looks quite good, at least if you can accept some comically animated dinosaurs. There's
nothing approaching the grandeur of, say,
Jurassic Park here, and instead the animators whether intentionally or
unintentionally repeatedly create comic characters, especially the birdlike creatures. The more traditional dinosaurs
frequently have a sort of slapdash quality to them, as if they weren't
quite finished being rendered. Some of the
live action backgrounds pop quite well, with some lustrous colors and good fine detail. The image
taken as a whole is well above average in terms of clarity and precision, but there are an awful lot of weird anomalies
dotting this enterprise, many of which seem to be part and parcel of the shoddy animation.
