Thanks for the memories!

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

There are some animated movies that have breathtaking animation and gorgeous backgrounds but everything else about the film is just awful that I feel that the film was a missed opportunity. Sadly, "Walking with Dinosaurs" is yet another one of those movies. This is a movie that has some fantastic visuals provided by the studio Animal Logic, but the story and the characters are absolutely atrocious that I certainly cannot recommend it. I'll get into why in a little bit, but here's what happens in this movie.After a pointless live action introduction with Karl Urban playing a paleontologist, we are told a tale about when a group of Pachyrhinosaurus dinosaurs living in the Cretaceous era migrate back in forth every winter through the Alaskan wilderness. In the film we focus on three young dinosaurs named Patchi, his brother Scowler and their friend Juniper along with a bird named Alex and how they go on a crazy journey including get lost in the wilderness and even having to watch their parents get killed by a Gorgosaurus. You may be now wondering why I haven't put in the voice actors yet and the reason why is because I don't consider them voice overs as much as inner thoughts from the characters provided by Justin Long, John Leguizamo, Tiya Sircar and Skyler Stone. The dinosaurs don't talk as their lips don't move yet we still hear their voices as if they're psychic. There's a huge reason why this doesn't work but I'm going to talk about the visuals first.The animation in this film is gorgeous. It has some fantastic live action backgrounds and the animation for the dinosaurs looked great as well. The dinosaurs are all impressively rendered and I was amazed at how well detailed they were. It's really a pristine movie to look at. Too bad there wasn't a mute button for this movie because I would have used it had I had the chance. The voice over work is so annoying and juvenile that it really sinks the movie. From what I've read, the film was supposed to be have no voice over work or narration at all and was supposed to be told visually yet the stupid executives at 20th Century Fox forced the director to include voice over work in order for the children in the audience to connect with the dinosaurs. That was a terrible move. By doing this, we have to listen to some awful juvenile humor read by actors from Fox's other family movies that it's difficult to relate to the characters and I honestly struggled to get through my viewing. One joke about how Alex and Patchi argue of how the dinosaur fell into the river and how the film actually rewinds to the same scene was so unfunny that I actually almost gave up watching the film. I'm not even kidding. This film is so unfunny and juvenile I nearly gave up. Even the educational element of this film falls flat. To teach kids about certain dinosaurs, the film pauses itself whenever a new dinosaur appears on screen and has a second grader read off the text information about the dinosaur. That also really annoyed me.Annoying is the best word to sum up "Walking with Dinosaurs". Despite it's breathtaking visuals, the voice overs added to the characters as well as the failed attempts to educate the audience failed spectacularly resulting in one of the most annoying animated movies I have ever seen. If I were to grade those two elements separately, I would give the visuals a perfect ten but everything else a one. Though in average, I think a two seems about right. Hopefully, there will be another edit of this movie to remove that juvenile audio because I certainly would want to see a more adult version of this movie. Until then, I'm sticking with "The Land Before Time".

My kids, like most young kids, absolutely love Dinosaurs. So as a parent, I thought what better way to have an educational yet entertaining family experience than to watch this together. Boy was I wrong. This movie, though it is inspired by the BBC mini-series, is terrible. Granted the stunning visuals and photo-realism of the dinosaurs was really impressing, that gloss was quickly overshadowed by horrible writing and even worse voice acting. The writing was absolutely abysmal and felt forced. The jokes were terrible, the narrator (the crow/chicken bird thing) was annoying and ruined the film with it's inability to shut up through most of the scenes. The banter between the dinosaur characters also felt forced and drawn out. Why do they need to have 20 minute conversations about absolutely nothing in most of the scenes? Did Larry David write this? Back to the voice acting. Oh my God, the voice acting was cringeworthy. The voice actors made no attempt whatsoever to play "characters" but sounded like they were just reading lines off of a piece of paper while constantly checking the time (they probably were). The dialogue and the movement of the Dinos' mouths didn't even correctly sync. Is this one of those things where we're imagining that they're talking? And just so you never fully feel like you're watching either a fictional film, or a documentary about Dinosaurs, every time a new dino is introduced on screen, we get a pause and their name written in bold across the screen as it's read aloud by a group of little kids off camera. This film was so bad that my kids who are obsessed with Dinosaurs begged me to turn it off and put on Pixar's The Good Dinosaur instead. Yes, it's that bad.

Review: I wasn't that impressed with this movie. The storyline was all over the place and the graphics wasn't that good. maybe I need to see it I 3D. I thought that it was going to be like a Dinosaur version of the Lion King, but it was no way close. To be honest, I didn't pay that much attention to the movie after a while because it became tedious and uninteresting. The voices were quite annoying and storyline was sketchy. The kids will most probably enjoy it but from an adults point of view, it nothing like the TV series. In all, I expected better. Disappointing!Round-Up: I really can't see were the $80 million dollar budget, went in the movie because it doesn't look that amazing. With the voices of actors like Justin Long and John Leguizamo, the director didn't bring the characteristics of the actors into the movie, like a lot of animation movie do nowadays, but some of the action scenes wasn't that bad. Basically, if you want the kids to be quiet for the afternoon then you can put this movie on, but it's not really for the older folk. Budget: $80million Worldwide Gross: $127millionI recommend this movie to people who are into there animated dinosaur movies for the kids. 3/10

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.