We catch up with our favourite investigative Teutonic misanthrope Werner Herzog in unexpected circumstances – providing snippets of insight to a child-friendly Walking with Dinosaurs copy, cobbled together from a Discovery Channel programme, Dinosaur Revolution.
In the late 1980s Alan Clarke made TV drama Elephant, a caustic comment on Northern Ireland, which consisted solely of random unexplained shootings.
Dinotasia is structured like a kiddies' remake, only with a little context. At regular 10-minute intervals Herzog briefly intones on the soundtrack as captions inform of the period and present-day location and then an animated vignette follows involving walking, fighting, eating, death and dismemberment.
I guess Herzog must have been attracted by the possibility of a project about his favourite theme 'the savage indifference of nature' that was aimed at a younger audience. Still, you have to wonder how he felt about uttering lines like: 'Time is more than a river, it is a fathomless ocean that separates us from what was,' or 'although coincidence has no soul, it provides a kind of mercy'.
Though the film tries to present itself as serious documentary (the blurb says it is based on 'cutting edge palaeontology') a lot of Herzog's speeches suggest a film that isn't taking itself too seriously.
When it comes to the extinction of the dinosaurs I'm pretty sure that even cutting-edge palaeontogists don't refer to this as 'The Great Dying'.
For an adult it gets tedious pretty quickly but through a child's eyes maybe it translates as Dinosaurs: The Good Bits. Certainly for my seven-year-old dinosaurobsessed nephew fresh off a 24-hour flight from Oz it was enough
to keep him awake and transfixed.
Though when pushed he conceded the animation wasn't the best.
DINOTASIA (PG)
Directors: Erik Nelson and David Krentz
Narrated by Werner Herzog
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