directed by Haruki Kadokawa
Japan
106 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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I probably shouldn't be reviewing this immediately after having watched it, because this feels like a movie that I have to sit with for a while. Which is a little ridiculous to say of a children's film with a baby dinosaur who gets a friendship bracelet as a reward for its first poop, but I'm seeing a lot of four- and five-star reviews, and it's making me second-guess my own, kind of lukewarm feelings about it. But I did like this! I liked it a lot. Let's talk about it a little more.
Chie (played by Yumi Adachi) is a young girl whose paleontologist father (I've only ever seen Tsunehiko Watase in yakuza movies, so it's weird to see him in loafers and a grandpa sweater) takes her into a mysterious cave, where their party - mostly by accident - crashes into a chamber deep underground. There they discover a dinosaur egg being held in stasis by some kind of severely '90s glowing energy triangle. Unable to resist, Chie's father and his partners take the egg back to their lab and try to hatch it. More specifically, Chie's mother, Naomi, apparently a world-famous embryologist (played by the lovely Shinobu Otake), arrives on the scene to try to hatch it. The family dynamic is very strained between Chie, her father, and her mother, Naomi having left at some point when Chie was even younger to pursue dreams of being a scientist that raising a child did not allow time for. There's a strong and implicit parallel between Chie becoming Rex's foster mother, stepping up to raise a baby with no one else to care for it, and what the film sees as Naomi's need to realize her role as Chie's mother.
It's... really kind of weird and uncomfortable, the way this movie deals with motherhood and femininity; it's not a huge enough problem to have completely ruined everything for me, but I kept thinking about it throughout the film and being like "ugh". The way the movie treats Naomi is kind of harsh, honestly. I can't even imagine how many more women scientists we would have had throughout history if society didn't force this idea of choosing either to do the "right" thing by staying home and being a good mother or continuing your career. Yeah, it does suck to abandon your child, but it also sucks that there's this double-standard where Chie's father does science and stuff while still actively parenting her, and there's no problem there, but for some reason Chie's mother can't be shown doing the same thing.
But anyway. A goofy little dude hatches out of the dinosaur egg, despite all odds, and very quickly they've got it doing microwave dinner and topical painkiller commercials. The Rex puppet is one of the best things about this whole movie for me, because I am a tokusatsu freak and if there's a guy in a suit or a puppet involved I want to examine it closely and reverently. Rex goes through different stages of growth, which is always really interesting to see depicted onscreen, from a newborn to a bipedal adolescent played by somebody whose back probably really really hurt. The articulation is pretty spectacular, allowing for very realistic movement, but you can tell in a lot of scenes where they were hiding the person puppeting Rex - not a problem to me, but it makes Rex's appearance less seamless. Rex is adorable, though, there's no denying that. It's a Minilla type of cuteness, but its constantly wagging tail and facial expressions make Rex more personable than kind of gross-looking Minilla.
The third act of the movie is where I felt like it began to fizzle out a little. Chie objects to having Rex do television commercials over and over, but we see from the Rex plushies in the background and the billboards and museum exhibits that Rex is still immensely profitable, and the people who are profiting off of it do not take kindly to any interruption of their cash flow. The main villain is a guy trying to argue that he has full rights to Rex in perpetuity, and his goons (Dinosaur Sentai Koseidon fans rejoice, it's our man Morii Mori), who are hindered by a children's choir throwing snowballs at them and a lengthy snowmobile chase. It felt like the constant activity after Chie decides to take a break from her parents was the result of somebody going "this movie needs more chase scenes". Maybe I'm just boring but I enjoyed seeing Chie and Rex's one-on-one interactions more than that type of thing.
The other thing I had a problem with was this movie's mixture of esoteric, New Age mysticism and real-life Ainu culture. This is really something I don't know a lot about, so I can't speak to how Ainu people feel about seeing themselves depicted onscreen like this, but I can say that if this were set in the U.S., and the Ainu character in this movie was substituted with a Native American character - who would then be played by a non-Native actor - people would have an obvious and justified problem with that.
Aesthetically, this is a great movie. It's got that big-budget feel with small-budget toku sensibilities. I love the aerial shots of gorges and forests and the inside of the cave, especially the ice slide, which looked really fun. This is one of those movies that is packed wall-to-wall with stuff, and all the set decorating feels authentic; every residential house looks lived-in, every lab looks utile and real, it all just feels like it takes place in the physical world - with a dinosaur, of course. I love the escapism of this, the way it challenges you to pretend that a little girl really could wake up a baby dinosaur by playing the ocarina for it. Even though Christmas isn's the main focus, it's a good Christmas movie because of its themes of togetherness and mutual care. I just wish some of that didn't feel vaguely misogynistic, but I'm a stick in the mud about that. Maybe next year I'll rewatch this and try to get out of my own head a little more, and then I'll enjoy it better. Until then, merry something, may we all get dinosaurs this year.
(edit: I forgot about Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds. I guess that means this is part of the Tsunehiko Watase Doing Stuff With Dinosaurs Cinematic Universe.)
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