I gave it a 7.5 out of 10

A different way of telling a story

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Jacob's Review: I am an enormous dinosaur fan and I share this fanatic behaviour with a close friend. When we heard news of a Walking with Dinosaurs movie, the child in me got excited. I was utterly obsessed with the television documentary and a film adaptation seemed like a good idea at the time. However, I didn't hear an abundance of positive descriptions about this movie. So when I entered the theatre I braced myself... We could not have made a greater mistake than paying $20 each to go see this movie. The animation was spectacular but that was the only truly great attribute. For years many directors have been attempting to tell a prehistoric story simply through visuals or narration and this film's trailers depicted it in that light. It turns out that as an after thought, voice overs were added and a prologue with some dweeb teen who hates dinosaurs. He is then confronted by a bird voiced by John Leguizamo who can communicate telepathically. The bird begins to tell a story about a herd of ancient behemoths and the journey of three lost Pachyrhinosaurs. The voice overs are atrocious and all they ever talk about is fart, vomit and poop. It is really distracting when something is supposed to be taken seriously but is juxtaposed with this immature attempt to be humorous. It was as if the producers thought that children's attention spans wont last long if there isn't lines like "get your butt out of my face". As a stroke of genius they put this in because that's all kids care about isn't it? Screw this film. This movie is annoying and weak. Don't feed this to children. 3/10

The movie begins with a family traveling by car and they are searching for traces of animals that have extinct from Earth million years ago. At some point the boy hears a crow speaking and from here the story begins. We see the life of a dinosaur from the moment he was a cub until the moment he is mature. While he was little he had many obstacles to outrun like avoid being eaten by others predators and not to be accidentally stepped by his own kind. He frequently receive help from his mother when he was in danger. Time passes and now he learned to defend himself even meet a soul mate, but the real exam is when he must take a decision in witch he must choose to abandon a relative in peril or jump and help him along with the flock with the risk of injure his fellows. I think the directors of this animated movie tried unsuccessfully to borrow some ideas from other films like Ice Age or Tangled. There are not connected but the happenings are similar such as love and migration. The 3D effects are excellent but the fact that the animals are not moving their mouth when speaking is just lame. I mean why put effort and create such nice effects if you can't bother to make them more real or compelling? For the audience this fact is irritating but at the same time gives to the movie a plus of reality because animals don't talk. But considering that we see an animation this situation should not be avoided.I don't believe it's a bad movie but on a scale of 1 to 10, it's almost a 5 but not quite. 4.5 is just fair. Conclusion: watch it, enjoy it and that's all.

Looking at some of the comments it seem as if grown-ups seriously think that this movie was made for them. Guys, that movie is for the kids, and it is brilliant as such: awesome live-like animations, great music and sound effects, and yes, a touchingly simple story about a dino who made it all by using his head - and not for brute force attacks only :-) I also liked the dubbing style - where dinosaurs do not open their mouths for talking, as all the talking part is really in the style of making the dinosaurs look more human-like without sacrificing the reality. All of my kids 8, 7 and 3 years old loved this movie and watched it several times already. If you want a documentary style film about dinosaurs, simply move on and stop whimpering about this one. Or switch off the sound! :-D Otherwise grab your kids and enjoy the show.

Walking With Dinosaurs is a juvenile excuse for family entertainment; an eighty-seven minute slog masquerading as competent entertainment involving dinosaurs for children and an enthralling visual and thought-provoking experience for adults, the film winds up being neither stimulating nor entertaining as it takes the BBC miniseries from over a decade ago and cheapens it into something about as healthy as a Saturday morning cartoon.The first perplexity is how this adventure even kicks off. It begins with an atrociously acted prelude by showing a paleontologist named Jack (Karl Urban) taking his niece and nephew along to hunt for fossils. When they get there, his nephew is given a Gorgosaurus tooth by his uncle, who tells him to hold the tooth near and dear to him. The nephew goes to a bay where fossils are commonly found before meeting a talking crow who, I suppose, teleports his consciousness or our consciousness seventy million years back to the Late Cretaceous period, where we are created with visually stunning dinosaurs, who have the unfortunate luck of being able to talk in their own story. "Talk" is a strong verb in this case because one will notice overtime (or maybe immediately) the lips of these dinosaurs do not move, so perhaps the appropriate word in this case is "telecommunicating." The process of animal communicating in this film reminded me of Bob Saget's comedy Farce of the Penguins, which deserves to share the bottom-drawer along with Walking With Dinosaurs.The story then centers on the underdog of a large Pachyrhinosaurus named Patchi (voiced by Justin Long), who finds his size nothing but a burden and his naivete the butt of every joke. Patchi's father, however, is Bulldust, a towering behemoth who protects his family and children by roaring a deafening roar to scare off species like Troodons and other harmful creatures. A good friend of Patchi's is Alex (voiced by John Leguizamo), an Alexornis bird who guides him along this story, so one day he can be a strong, dependable dinosaur just like his father. In addition, because this is a coming-of-age story with animals, of course a love interest has to be introduced, which comes in the form of a female Pachyrhinosaurus named Juniper (Tiya Sircar), along with a bully by the name of Scowler (Skylar Stone of the largely-forgotten, short-lived Comedy Central show Con).If you're observant enough, you'll notice that many of these species' names are just shortened names of their given species, which makes it quite odd and perplexing. Also, I've name every dinosaur character in the film in that short little paragraph; the remaining species are just background characters to their own story, never telecommunicating and never chiming in for conversation whatsoever. Furthermore, a few times the dinosaurs reference future periods of time in their lifespan - how do they know their own current time period and how do they know of future ones as well? The list of puzzlements in Walking With Dinosaurs are very disconcerting, especially since this was based off of, from what I've seen, a very competent and enjoyable miniseries.In this regard, making the dinosaurs telecommunicate was a horrible miscalculation, especially seeing as they have nothing interesting to say. I can't say I know what dinosaurs would telecommunicate about if they could, but I'd hope that animals would provide more interesting insights than what is on display here. The amount of scatological humor, jokes about vomit, goofy jokes that have no purpose, and directionless verbal puns that have no purpose are astonishing. I'm faintly reminded of the animated film Foodfight! and how characters in that particular film seemed to speak in nothing other than puns and ridiculous jokes.Then there's the plain and direct fact that the film just gets to be a slog through neverending and horribly uninteresting material. The film occasionally wants to be a documentary by including pop-up descriptions of the dinosaurs like what their biological name is and what food they eat. However, it's not five minutes before our newly-introduced dinosaur begins talking about something horribly insignificant like the size of a dinosaur's butt or making another meaningless and frankly uncomfortable scatological joke. The saving grace when things like this happen are the evocative shots of sheer visual beauty, from the acres of forestry to the nicely-rendered CGI creatures of this wild-gone-past. But why take all this time to do animate these creatures and infuse a film like this with visual brilliance if you're going to make the characters horribly flat and depressingly childish? That's like creating a hologram of Elvis Presley and Tupac Shakur for them to sing nursery rhymes. If anything, conduct it like a DisneyNature documentary and let the visuals do the talking? Speaking in terms of its core audience, who knows how Walking With Dinosaurs will fare amongst children? I'm not even sure that "dinosaur" phase still exists with children, what with the internet and technology in the mix now. Even if your child is still invested in the idea of dinosaurs, feeding them this is the equivalent of feeding them fast-food for breakfast; it fills them up but you could do so much better.Starring: Karl Urban, Charlie Rowe, and Angourie Rice. Voiced by: Justin Long, John Leguizamo, Tiya Sircar, and Skyler Stone.