I never expected to find myself on a Saturday night, all alone in my recliner with a glass of wine and a notebook. Ready to carefully watch the 1993 children’s animated film. We’re Back: A Dinosaur’s Story. But life… life finds a way.
So what is this movie? If you give me the next five minutes of your life, I will attempt to make sense of what the hell is going on in this batshit insane movie.
Okay. A time traveling scientist played, naturally, by Walter Cronkite arrives in the Mesozoic era and he gives some breakfast cereal to four dinosaurs, which makes them all smart, gives them the ability to speak human, and it makes them docile and sweet and nice.
Our lead dinosaur is Rex. He is a tyrannosaurus rex voiced by John Goodman. And Walter Cronkite informs these dinosaurs that he also has in his possession a radio, which emits bubbles containing the wishes of all of the children throughout time.
And we come to see these bubbles and hear some of these wishes. “I wish my sister were nicer to me.” “I wish I had a mustache like Daddy’s.” “I wish my mom would stop drinking so much.” “I wish I could meet a dinosaur.” And then all the wishes become about dinosaurs. Kids are obsessed with dinosaurs. They would like to meet dinosaurs.
So Walter Cronkite now travels with our dinosaur heroes to the future. First they stop in 1963 to save President Kennedy, and then they arrive in 1993 in New York City. And there they meet the human hero of the movie. A little Great Depression-looking boy named Louie, who also acts like he’s a Little Rascal from the Great Depression. Like, he threatens the dinosaurs with a knuckle sandwich. He asks if they’re wise guys, but once they get past that, a fast friendship is formed and together they’re off to go visit a museum or something. This is what the dinosaurs were told they needed to do by Walter Cronkite. That’s their mission.
But they inadvertently end up in a Manhattan parade and John Goodman starts singing a little bippity-boppity-bop-bop song to great acclaim. All of the townspeople are so into it. They’re cheering him. The children are delighted. But then the parents realize these are real dinosaurs and they get terrified and run away. Which I say is reasonable.
We then meet an 8-year-old girl whose name is Cecilia Nuthatch. Now that is a name worthy of The Hunger Games. Suzanne Collins could have written this. Cecilia is voiced by Yeardley Smith, who is of course Lisa Simpson. And Yeardley Smith only has one voice and it’s the Lisa voice. But because she’s a great actor, this feels like an entirely different performance. In fact, it’s too real of a performance. This 8-year-old girl cries and wails in pain over and over again throughout this movie. It is way too much.
So at this point, a different movie hijacks the dinosaur movie and takes over. Now Louie and Cecilia, they’re abducted by the villainous and sinister Professor Screweyes,
And he runs this experimental circus. This is no longer a dinosaur movie. It’s a circus movie with some weird scientific experiments going on. And Professor Screweyes forces the two child protagonists to sign their name to a forever contract. And of course, they need to sign their name in their own blood, which sells their souls to him for the rest of eternity. And then he turns them into monkeys. And this is a truly terrifying moment. I feel like this movie doesn’t get mentioned in the annals of legendary, terrifying children’s movies like Return to Oz or The Witches, but I feel like it’s right up there.
So producer Steven Spielberg pitched this movie as the child-friendly alternative for kids who were too young to go see Jurassic Park. Because this was released very closely with Jurassic Park. But this moment in the movie is way scarier than anything in Jurassic Park.
So the dinosaurs, they make a deal with Professor Screweyes. “Restore our friends to their bodies and minds,” they ask, please. “We’ll perform for you as circus monsters in return.” And Professor Screweyes agrees, done and done. The kids turn back into humans. The dinosaurs revert back to being like regular, bloodthirsty dinosaurs.
But this upsets Louie the Little Rascal/Great Depression kid, and he cries and cries at the feet of the monstrous John Goodman. He’s like, “Oh, please Mr. Dinosaur. Please turn back into a good T-Rex! I love you so much, please!” And this works. This causes John Goodman to turn back into a nice dinosaur and then they all have a mutiny and take over the circus, overthrow Professor Screweyes, send him to hell.
And then there’s like 10 minutes of clown circus bullshit while this movie is running in place on a treadmill, desperately trying to get to a feature film length’s running time. Without credits, this movie’s about 64 minutes long. And that’s that.
Oh no, there’s all the dinosaurs beg for the two child protagonist, these 8-year-old children to please romantically kiss each other repeatedly, which they do. Okay? That’s what happens in this movie.
So the obvious question is, what the hell? What is the deal with all of this? My awareness of this movie, such that I had any, was that I remember it from video store boxes. I assumed this was some straight-to-VHS trash. And part of the problem is the anonymous title. “We’re Back: A Dinosaur’s Story.”
Now, this was the second movie produced for Steven Spielberg’s Amblimation Studios. Now, this was the first movie that was produced for Steven Spielberg’s Amblimation Studios. The first movie was An American Tail: Fievel Goes West.
And so there’s a team of animation directors who worked on Fievel Goes West, and then they rotated into this and then rotated out to work on the next production, which was Balto. So you have this team of animators who were like coming in and out. No cohesive vision. We’re Back: A Dinosaur’s Story has four credited directors. They are Simon Wells, Phil Nibbelink, and Dick and Ralph Zondag. And these are all pedigreed, talented animators. But it totally makes sense why, when you’re watching the movie, why it feels like such a jumble. There is no one cohesive voice.
And it is based on a 20-page children’s book that, from what I can tell, doesn’t have a plot. So last year there was an oral history of this movie done by Josh Weiss of SyFy.com and Phil Nibblelink, one of the directors said, “We had to take Hudson Talbot’s little book, which basically had no villain and hardly any plot and turn it into an 85-minute feature film with American movie structure. For him, that was a very painful and horrifying process to watch us try to expand his little cute idea into a full-blown thing. He was always afraid that we were killing his baby, and in a real sort of way, we were.”
Look, I have a lot of affection for weird, forgotten animated movies. Like any animated movie is a miracle. Animation is such an enormous undertaking that I have gratitude that any exists, even if they’re bad. And this movie is bad. This was a $20 million production. It was an enormous critical and commercial flop when it was released. But I do see it has a little bit of a cult following online, and I assume that has to do with people who grew up watching it. So I want to hear from you. If you watched this movie as a kid, did it scare the shit out of you? Was it one of those scary twisted kids movies? Did you like it? Did you find it fun and whimsical? What did you like about it?
But to me, the most interesting thing is the Steven Spielberg and the Jurassic Park of it all. There’s literally in this movie, there’s a marquee outside a movie theater that says in really big letters, “Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park.” The characters are walking outside of a movie theater that’s showing Jurassic Park and the villain of this movie, Professor Screweyes, what he’s trying to do is turn dinosaurs from being nice and kid-friendly and gentle to being mean and monstrous, which is exactly what Spielberg was doing in Jurassic Park. So is this movie saying that Steven Spielberg is Professor Screweyes? That is something to ponder.
Okay, final thoughts. The animation overall is pretty weak. I’d say the character animation, the dinosaur designs are solid but uninspired, but the backgrounds are so bland. You basically see through them, they’re like vapor. I mean, this is supposed to be a rich world… “Manhattan. Can you imagine dinosaurs being inserted into it?” But it’s just sort of stock, repeating, bland backgrounds. There’s just nothing to grab onto visually. And more than that, nothing to grab onto with the story. The story is nothing. This is like a bunch of index cards of ideas that somebody dropped and then hastily picked up and put back together out of order. It’s okay. I’m glad I watched it. If you liked it, I want to hear from you. What are your memories of We’re Back: A Dinosaur’s Story?
SOURCE:
“Roll Back the Rock: An Oral History of We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story for its 30th Anniversary” by Josh Weiss | SyFy.com (2023) – https://bit.ly/3Wa1HhK