We’re in familiar children’s entertainment territory at the start of this family animation featuring a tiny little sincere dinosaur: mildly annoying lead character, mildly annoying would-be wizard sidekick delivering all the requisite snarky asides, plus mildly annoying assorted other critters. But in an unlikely swerve, this Czech/Polish/Slovakian production (dubbed into English for this release) turns out to honour the more formally and conceptually interesting heritage of east European animation. A couple of beats into the story, we suddenly find ourselves in a live-action environment, with a real human sitting in a dark basement studio, working away, drawing cartoons – the self-same cartoon, in fact, that we’ve just been watching.
The artist is then interrupted by an extremely grating woman – think Joan Cusack’s deranged hyper-girly Debbie Jellinsky in Addams Family Values – who demands that he erase his existing creations and create something marketable and “cute”. And so the erasure of the insufficiently cute begins, with devastating effect. Diplo the dinosaur loses his parents, and somewhat irritating though he is, it’s a little bit heartbreaking that he believes the destruction of everyone and everything he has ever known to be his fault.
The meta fiction continues with the erasure of the kookier or more abrasive characters to make way for something more palatable and commercial and to give the film additional thematic resonance – animation, after all, being the moving-image genre most affected by the lure of the cute. In this particular case though, while the ideas on show are more interesting than your run-of-the-mill kids’ fodder, the characters lack charisma. It’s not as simple as animated critters in fact needing to be cute, necessarily, but you do have to want to spend a decent amount of time with them, and I can’t say that this is entirely the case with these guys.
• Diplo: The Mighty Dinosaur is in UK and Irish cinemas 19 September.
