Walking With Dinosaurs: The 3D Movie

The original BBC series Walking With Dinosaurs was shown back in 1999, long before the target audience for the new feature film spin-off was even born. But now, as Walking With Dinosaurs: The 3D Movie arrives in our cinemas, helped by almost a decade and a half ’s worth of improvements in computer-assisted visual effects, it won’t take accompanying parents very long to realise that a lot has changed.

Out goes the cultured narration of Kenneth Branagh and the educational approach of the television series, and in comes, er, a lot of talking dinosaurs and a voice cast led by Justin Long and John Leguizamo. It’s a change in creative tack likely to divide opinion.

Thankfully, the dinosaurs themselves, seamlessly and convincingly placed in landscapes shot in Alaska and New Zealand, are terrific, and with Neil Nightingale, former head of the BBC’s Natural History Unit, on board as the film’s co-director, you know a huge amount of effort has gone into getting the biological detail right.

Amid all the entertainment, education has certainly not been abandoned. But it’s definitely children’s entertainment that comes first. The story of Patchi, a small Pachyrhinosaurus who teams up with his girlfriend, Juniper, and his bigger brother, Scowler, on the annual migration to the winter feeding grounds, has definite echoes of Disney’s Dinosaur from 2000. If the film has a higher purpose, though, it is to bring the fossil record to life and, in doing so, create a whole new generation of dinosaur fans.

Matthew Bond