We're Back! a Dinosaur's Story - Getting Lost in the "Last Frontier of Imagination"

Last month, Variety ran a piece observing, “Hollywood Can’t Survive Without Animation. So Why Won’t the Industry Respect It?” by Clayton Davis, who reported,

“In the nearly five decades that domestic grosses have been tracked, an animated film has finished the year as the No. 1 release just seven times, beginning with Disney’s “Aladdin” in 1992. Now the medium is having an unprecedented run, with “Inside Out 2” and “Zootopia 2” topping the last two calendar years (a first for animated movies to lead the box office for two consecutive years) and the latter becoming the highest-grossing animated film ever domestically. “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” is leading 2026 so far and is the only film to cross $1 billion. Setting aside the 2020 and 2021 pandemic seasons, which emptied theaters of family films, animated features have made up about 20% of the year’s 10 top-grossing releases over the past decade. And yet, the artists who make these movies have rarely felt less valued: In May 2024, Pixar cut 14% of its staff — roughly 175 employees. Netflix restructured its animation unit in 2023, eliminating jobs and halting two films in preproduction. 

“One animator put it plainly: ‘You have no idea how frustrating it is to see press release after press release touting how much money our animated film made and how many nominations we got; then [the studio] turns to people who have worked here forever and says, ‘We don’t need you anymore.’”

         This piece dropped about a week before it went public that The Walt Disney Company was doing substantial layoffs, particularly within the department of Pixar Animation, presumably as a response to Hoppers not making a billion dollars because “what do you mean people are just waiting 8 weeks until it hits Disney+?”

         This is a very familiar story. Animation is doing so much heavy-lifting, yet a number of gatekeepers refuse to afford it due examination or dialogue. Most critics have a hard time knowing how to approach discussion around these things and severely underestimate how their own biases are coloring their reactions to these films. And this has a concrete impact on the people who make this their living. 

         This motivates a lot of my discussion around things like Disney Animation, which has been a key lubricant in the film conversation ever since Mickey Mouse whistled “Turkey in the Straw” as he chartered the Steamboat Willie down the river.

         But I’m actually going to examine this situation today not through anything Disney, or even through a movie I’d consider to be the apex of animation. I want to talk today about animation during a particular window when the world was starting to reckon with how the artform was absolutely a vehicle for artistic and financial returns, but before anyone really knew how to drive this thing. 

This was the ecosystem in which we got movies like We’re Back! a Dinosaur’s Story—that dino movie from ‘93 that wasn’t Jurassic Park.

People who remember this movie belong to a very select club. The film did not receive much boosting from critics or audiences at the time of release. Pamela Bruce, Austin Chronicle, said that the film, “... is filled with a lack of originality, such as mixing some stylistic elements from Tim Burton and Hitchcock, and turning it into a second-rate rip-off of Disney's The Jungle Book.” Janet Maslin in The New York Times called the film, “shamelessly sentimental.”  

  I will say upfront that I do adore this movie. And there are specific things about the movie that I think it does very well that I wish other movies would emulate. Even so, at its best, We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story cannot escape these flaws that critics didn't have a hard time zeroing in on. In this case, it wasn’t just journalists being blithe because “cartoons be for kidz.” 

Today’s essay is kind of a compliment sandwich centered on a movie that really captures the paradox of animation. At its worst, We’re Back! a Dinosaur’s Story reminds us just what a tricky beast animation can be, and how it takes more than just brightly colored drawings and silly jingles to make it work. At its best, the film reminds us how animation is capable of eliciting responses so otherworldly that we’re willing to try to tame this beast anyway. 

  

         Memory Lane

         The film sees Rex, a tyrannosaurus who receives a treatment (i.e. magical cereal) from a benevolent, time-travelling mad scientist, Professor Neweyes, which allows him to evolve past his primitive ways and become intelligent and capable of speech. Neweyes has a magic wish radio that broadcasts the wishes of young children from across time, and he has enlisted Rex and three other dinosaurs to accompany him to 1993 to answer the loudest call of all: the children who want to see real live dinosaurs. Neweyes instructs them to find the kindhearted Dr. Bleeb who will house them in the Museum of Natural History where they can fulfill their mission, and also to beware of his evil brother, Professor Screweyes.

         Neweyes drops them in the middle of the Hudson river where they are fished out by Louie, a young runaway. Louie left home so he could join the circus, but offers to show them around the city until they can find the museum. They are joined by Cecelia, the young daughter of rich New Yorkers who are out of town.

         The dinosaurs find themselves at the Thanksgiving Day parade where the patrons assume they are giant balloons. When it becomes clear that they are flesh and blood, the adults in the crowd panic and the dinosaurs are separated from the kids. There’s a chase sequence around New York City, and the dinosaurs realize that the circus Louie is running away to is actually an evil circus run by none other than Professor Screweyes.

         The dinosaurs arrive too late to stop the kids from selling their souls away to the circus, but Screweyes offers to release them if the dinosaurs will take their place as monstrous headliners for his show. They accept the offer, reversing the process that gave them their enlightenment.

         Cecelia and Louie infiltrate the show the next night to try to find some way to liberate their friends. Screweyes brings out the de-evolved dinosaurs to frighten his audience, but his own hold over them is broken. Louie runs out to the arena just before a savage Rex can gobble up Screweyes. Louie embraces Rex and begs him to not be this worse version of himself. Louie’s plea touches Rex’s heart, and his benevolent nature is restored to him and the other dinosaurs.

         Professor Neweyes soars down in his time machine to rescue the kids and the dinosaurs and take them to their final destination. Rex and company finally join Dr. Bleeb at the museum as living exhibits, and the kids make peace with their families.

         The house of my childhood was not very discerning in whatever VHS tapes we let in. If it was a cartoon, we had it on the shelf. Yet we somehow missed this movie. I encountered this film one single time as a five year old when my cousins had it playing on the television upstairs. I walked in specifically during the part where the evil circus man turned the kids into monkeys, and I was deeply horrified by this. 

         So, my nostalgia(?) for the film can all be wrapped up in maybe half a viewing from some fifteen years prior. I didn’t actually let myself watch the movie until I stumbled upon it on Netflix some weeks after being accepted into my university’s film program and remembered that this movie existed. But despite it having basically no nostalgic holding in my heart, I very quickly found myself falling hard for this little hot chocolate mug of a film. Not so much that I couldn’t accept that, yes, this felt more like the first draft of a good movie, but enough that I was really excited to fish this movie out of the $5 bin of Walmart so that it could join my collection at last.

          I want to use this movie as a vantage point to zero in on that time of transition for animation. I want to explore facets of the movie’s craft and production history to reveal just how complicated this animation beast can be. Parts of the movie work very, very well, but these victories are all mired in a film that is trying hard to justify its own existence. 

And part of what this complex chemical reaction reaffirms to me is that making an animated film takes expertise and resources, the kind that wasn’t widely available in early 90s Hollywood. But in those spaces where the machinery is working, the pay-offs can be tremendous.

 

Animation in the Time of Aladdin

When Who Framed Roger Rabbit dropped in 1988, the world was blown away by this novel blend of live-action and animation. The success of this movie would help pave the way for the Disney Renaissance, starting with The Little Mermaid the next year and continuing through the next decade, as well as the premiere of Pixar Animation with Toy Story in 1995.

Steven Spielberg, who was a producer for and early advocate of “Roger Rabbit,” saw that boom before the rest of us, which moved him to form Amblimation, a subsidiary of Amblin Entertainment dedicated just to making quality animated films. Based on both his larger career as well as his specific commentaries, I can believe he wanted to get into animation for the right reasons. In his words, “I have much more fun making an animated movie. You can make an $18 million animated feature look like a $100 million live-action movie. You can animate anything — the universe, all of creation. It’s the last frontier of the imagination.”

The Swan Princess (1994)

         The New York Times ran a piece around this time tracking Hollywood’s new love affair with the artform. Animation veteran, Jane Baer, noted here, "This is a tremendous boost for animation, which has been the poor dog in the corner for so long. Katzenberg and Spielberg will be totally inventive. There will be a surprise around every corner. They could break Disney's monopoly on talent."

Animation would get there … eventually. But “We’re Back!” was one of the first out of the gate. The first pawn that gets gobbled in a game of chess when you’re still figuring out what your strategy even is. This movie actually opened the same weekend as A Perfect World, which underperformed at an $8 M opening weekend, and “We’re Back!” still only made about half of that, its worldwide total gross landing at less than $10 M. One of the directors, Phil Nibbelink, observed, “We were all hoping that we were creating a dinosaur craze, and unfortunately, when We're Back! came out, we couldn't get the same people [who saw Jurassic Park] to go see the movie. It was very frustrating.”

Quest for Camelot (1998)

  Amblimation had very high hopes, wanting to deliver one animated film a year. But the studio never figured out how to capture the attention of the masses or to produce films that were worth watching, and it closed in 1995 after its third consecutive flop with Balto. Other studios didn’t fare much better.

Much of the 90s knock-offs were pale imitations of what Disney Animation made look effortless. Then around the end of the decade we had solid hits from the likes of The Prince of Egypt or The Iron Giant. Though, the latter was not financially successful. 

But then, of course, along came a certain green ogre …

    In fairness to Shrek, the movie did quite a bit to draw attention to animation, but at a great cost. The expectation for what animation could do became fossilized for a good ten years after Shrek, which certainly didn’t help convince anyone that animation was good for a lot more than just fart gags, pop-culture shoutouts, and general slapstickery. Dreamworks Animation had a very specific template it worked from basically until How to Train Your Dragon. Other animated studios had no choice but to follow, and the echoes of something like Flushed Away are still felt in something like Minions & Monsters.

  Something that it would take a while for studios to learn was that animated and live-action films have distinct production methods and ask different things of their storytellers. While a director’s leadership obviously still matters here, animation is a more collaborative medium than live-action filmmaking. 

And something we know now is that no one working on “We’re Back!” thought they were making the same movie. It didn’t help that the film was passed around various directors and writers across a prolonged production period—this movie was not, for example, initially expected to play in the same basic window as Jurassic Park. Again, to quote Nibbelink,

“We had different versions of the movie, and earlier on it was a lot funnier and a lot lighter. John Patrick Shanley['s] version was much darker, and Steven liked that and I did not. I worry that maybe that's one of the reasons that it didn't do well in the theater, I'm not sure … 

“Part of the thing that created the repair work was we screened it for an audience, we had a test screening at Universal, and Sid Sheinberg was there, and we listened to the focus group, the focus group hated the film. And so Sid Sheinberg pressured Steven into making a lot of big changes.”

Hence, watching this movie is kind of like consuming a reheated casserole where the bacon, the potatoes, and the broccoli are all at different temperatures. And by the time the film landed, the world just did not know what to do with it. This isn’t quite the case with something like ELIO where the movie is actually pretty solid, it was just punished by a ruthless market. “We’re Back” has some verifiable flaws. But before we get into the specifics of why the film stumbles, I want to spend a second on why this movie had so much going for it on paper.

Childhood

    We’re Back: A Dinosaur’s Story! is a movie about the love between kids and the adult figures who act in the role of parents. The movie traces out this symbiotic setup where both kids and adults alike are sustained by an exchange of love between these two groups. And this movie's observations have a lot to do with the things we know from movies like The Night of the Hunter and the way that children are disadvantaged by adults who don't feel obligated to listen to them.

You have the kids who are shown to possess that reverence for the magical things of the world—and who also just want someone to pay attention to them. Louie and Cecelia wind up being our focal points to this group, but we see them as standing in for a larger class of individuals. Most of the kids are shown to be suffering from some kind of neglect in the absence of their parents. Cecelia in particular is supplied with material care, but she feels neglected in her empty house.

       Then you have the adults who are in a position to give this love, but generally choose not to because they have “better things” to do like build a skyscraper. The film really zeroes into just how much kids starve for reliable caregivers who will grant them attention.

         There are little moments that feel like they should be just throwaway gags for a kid’s film but actually carry some thematic utility. One New Yorker straight-up trips over Rex’s gigantic feet, but barely looks up from his newspaper except to chide him to “Watch yourself, please.” From this, we understand that he’s literally so caught up in his own business that he can’t recognize this giant lizard right in front of him. There’s also an insert scene where a little girl is admiring a beautiful hat in a shop window and wants her mother to acquire it for her. Her mother’s face is out of the frame, implying that the mother and the daughter don’t really even exist in the same universe and she is not at all receptive to her young daughter’s interest.

There are some adults in this film who are meant to be benevolent, but even they are still beholden to a kind of adult cluelessness. A running joke is Professor Bleeb’s obliviousness as she narrowly, repeatedly misses the dinosaurs pinballing around New York City, which is how they get in trouble with the evil circus in the first place. There’s also a clown character, voiced by Martin Short, who works for Screweyes but is actually very sympathetic. He seems to be genuinely benevolent, but because of capitalism and stuff, he is still subservient to his overlord’s wicked designs. The kids earn his sympathy after they laugh at his routine, something Screweyes never does, and he helps them infiltrate the circus later on to save Rex and the dinosaurs.

      There’s also this sort of in-between group of teenagers or childless adults who are shown to be patrons of Screweyes’ circus. There’s a suggestion that this group subjects itself to being scared just so that they feel something in their sterile catatonia that is adulthood. They’re filling a void that ought to be filled with the emotional investment supplied by caring for someone helpless—the thing the dinosaurs are doing. In this way, the teen characters become a face to the savage dinosaurs before Neweyes fed them the brain-gain cereal.

   The dinosaurs themselves are adult-coded, but they are also not participants in the adult economy that blinds these parents to the emotional needs of their kids. And so, they are free to give the attention and love that parents ought to. They represent what adults are supposed to be for kids. So the movie makes the observation that what civilizes a person is stepping into a parental role. (Or, I guess a balanced breakfast.)

The story catches Louie at a sort of junction between all of these groups. Louie is sort of a fading candle. Childhood magic is sort of deteriorating in him as he feels caught between what the world is telling him he should be and what comes naturally to him.

     There’s a hanging suggestion that Louie is on track to fall in with the group of gargoylish teenagers if he does not sort out his feelings of displacement. The possibility of Louie forming real friendships with the dinosaurs, or with Cecelia, is what might save him from a future of apathy or sadism. Louie’s culminating moment comes from him shedding his defenses and acting out of faith, begging his friend to not give into his baser instincts, and that’s the kind of action that would break through the machinations of evil adults.

         I started off large because the intention is there. You can see why a person would think this movie could work. But again, this movie came together in a time when people didn’t really know how animated films were built. And so, the audience winds up having to put in way too much work to make all these parts come together.

 

Animated Movies Need Screenplays Too

         With its few basic elements, you can see the appeal of Hudson Talbot’s picture book, and of a feature-length animated film for kids. It has the same basic ingredients as like Jurassic Park but without the terror, and with some added fantastical elements for good measure. This is a movie that works really well in concept, but falls apart in execution. The story doesn’t have great instincts for what story points actually serve the narrative. 

There’s a wholly unnecessary frame narrative, for example, with a young bird who wants to literally leave the nest, but is dissuaded for some reason by Rex’ recounting the story of how he came to New York City. We don’t emerge from this narrative understanding something about the Rex and Louie storyline that we didn’t already know. The film also has Elsa, the pterodactyl, flirt endlessly with Rex in a storyline that has no basis in anything other than the fact that Elsa is the only girl dinosaur so she’s obviously gotta flirt with somebody.

         The children’s picture book has about 8 minutes of plot, and the movie translates almost all of it. The dinosaurs eating magic cereal, them plummeting into the Hudson from above the skyscrapers, even Rex ruining the parade by mistaking the balloon dinosaur for the real thing, that’s all in the book. But the movie still has to fill an hour of runtime for what is still a remarkably short movie.

         The original story does not have any child characters tagging along for the ride. I honestly think that looping them in was a good call, but the film struggles to develop an organic way to build tension around them.

    There’s something like a fifteen-minute span between Cecelia joining the group and the fateful circus deal, which is not sufficient time to develop this bond between the kids and the dinosaurs. The film is going to have these dinos make this ultimate sacrifice to rescue them from the evil circus. And it’s essential that by the time we do, we feel the integrity of that bond so we understand why Rex and the others would do this.

         And it doesn’t take a lot of runtime to create this. The bond at the center of Monsters Inc. unfolds at roughly the same timeframe in-universe and is much more believable. You don’t need the standard 40 hours psychologists say it takes to build a friendship. But you need one or two mini-adventures for us to get the basic idea of how these characters interact with one another. Yet all we get for the kids is one parade down New York City–which ends very abruptly.

     The screenplay for this film would be penned by John Patrick Shanely, who would later go on to be known for his seminal play “Doubt,” the film adaptation for which he would direct in 2008. But his biggest brag at the time was for Moonstruck—that rom-com in which Cher and Nicolas Cage banter back and forth about why a person might choose to have an affair. Shanley dished out a script for “We’re Back!” in what Wells would call “record time.”

    Shanley was also reportedly very protective of this script, refusing to let the actors vary from his dialogue—which the cast, animators, and critics would all agree was rather patchy. So, I guess we have Shanley to thank for such lines as Cecelia’s prayer, “Please, don’t let bad happen” … These guys are supposed to be like 10, but this sounds like it was written for a 3-year-old. Lines like these are trying to invoke the innocence and earnestness of children, but imagine Harry and Ron trying to stop the troll from destroying the Hogwarts bathroom and Hermione sobbing in the corner hoping, “Let no bad happen …”

    Dialogue can speak to a person's idealism without needing to condescend or swaddle itself in saccharinity. See, as one example, this little bit from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn where a father explains to his daughter about the titular tree in the center of their apartment complex persevering, a metaphor foreshadowing the daughter's growth through the story:

"See where it's coming from. Right up outta that cement! Didn't nobody plant it. Didn't ask the cement to grow. It just couldn't help growing so much it just pushed that old cement out of the way. Now when you bust it with something like that, can't anybody help it, like... like that little ole bird up there. He didn't ask anybody could he sing and he certainly didn't take any lessons. He's so full of singing it just has to bust out someplace."

There are specific lines from "We're Back" that feel like they wandered in from a smarter movie, like when Louie insists "I'm big enough to suit my own purposes!", but a lot of the dialogue feels like it was written by someone who’s been stuck on a desert island for twenty years and forgot how people speak. Like the four-year-old watching the dinosaurs and remarking, “Holy smokes, are they ever big?!”

         But where I think the movie really cripples itself is in how it obscures the motivations of the main character. At his heart, Louie is trying hard to grow up. And the way to do that, he thinks, is to separate himself from his family and join the circus where no one will ever boss him around or make him feel small. His exact family situation is somewhat vague, but a lot of his story can be intuited. That’s not really what I mean when I say his motivation is underdeveloped. 

The circus, to start, is a really weird face to the portal into adulthood. This is a weird place for Louie to try to grow up before his time. Like, imagine if in Mary Poppins, Jane and Michael’s father had been a circus performer instead of a banker, and the story hung on Mary Poppins having to teach this lion tamer to give room for such frivolities as spending time with your kids. I know we were still nearly 30 years out from The Greatest Showman, but I also feel like the circus kind of speaks for itself.

    More to the point, Louie’s reasoning for signing his soul to the master villain makes no sense. He’s just so convinced that going to the circus is going to solve all of his problems. But … why? What does he think the circus is going to do for him? And why this circus? The one run by the guy with nails for eyes? Why would this creepypasta carnival be appealing to a kid who has demonstrated no interest in the macabre? What is the pay-off? What is the lie he is falling for? Why is he making this choice that is going to have dire consequences for him, his lady love, and his dinosaur buddies?

To be clear, this isn’t really about the obvious wrongheadedness of the decision. Characters make stupid choices all the time and are still easy to engage with. It’s about the film not understanding how to communicate the interior life of its protagonists and to take them on the necessary psychological journeys. 

Elevator to the Gallows (1958)

        Cinema can tell a compelling story about a character literally trying to get away with killing his boss so he can steal his wife, and you can tell a whole story just about him trying to break in and out of the building to do this, and that can be the kind of story you study during the French New Wave section of Film History 231. That can reveal something about the twisted nature of love, desire, and society. Your character can be obviously wrongheaded and still make sense, but that’s not the case with Louie selling his soul to the circus.

This is not Ariel giving her voice to the sea witch for her one chance to self-actualize. Neither is it like Pinocchio being lured to the debauchery of Pleasure Island. The only way to really justify what’s happening here is that Louie’s a kid who doesn’t really know what he’s doing. It barely feels like a choice. And this is not how your audience should feel about your protagonist during their moment of greatest learning.

Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005)

Believability in film doesn’t really have much to do with the presence of fantastical elements. A movie with talking dinosaurs still has an obligation to make itself accessible. Whatever the influence of fantasy-based ingredients, there remains a core of human psychology that needs to be recognizable: Do I understand what truth this film is trying to capture? And this movie is inconsistent in that.

         It seems like Shanley may have been one of those folks who was fascinated with animation but didn’t really seem to understand that it had its own specific language and emerged out of its own specific process. Or else, he didn’t understand that even “kids movies” are still beholden to certain expectations. And it’s because of things like this that I can’t really be surprised that this movie was just dropped from the public imagination after a very embarrassing run.

    The Disney movies of the time, and I’d also argue of much earlier, didn’t really have these same issues. Complex ideas were often distilled into something that could be easily articulated in a children’s film, but things like character motivation were baked stronger. (See, for example, my character study of Ariel). Other animation outlets would also get much, much better at doing this consistently. 

But even with all this on the table, I can’t really consider this movie a failure, or be totally content that this movie is just forgotten by the discourse. The modern scape of children’s movies would be much stronger if they knew how to apply a lot of what this movie does naturally.

  

Sentimentality

         Whatever else this movie is, this movie is overwhelmingly sentimental. And more, it’s the Spielberg kind of sentimental—which is distinct from the Capra or Chaplin kind of sentimental. Like, I recognize the flavor of emotion this film unlocks from something like “There you are, Peter!” from Hook—which makes sense. This whole studio was the project of the guy who gave the world ET.

But here’s the other thing that makes “We’re Back!” such a bizarre entry in my book of favorites: I didn’t actually like ET for a long time.

         I saw it once as a kid and felt nothing for it. I caught it again early in my college years and found it cloying and sloppy. I came around to it eventually after I sort of had the ET phenomenon explained to me, such that I am now in a position to appreciate that it’s actually a solid work and that the film ecosystem is better for it.

    But I found myself falling hard for We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story the very first time I saw it, even as my budding film student brain was getting bogged down in the narrative’s many, many problems. Because the film does sort of float in that sentimental wading pool, it has a very easy time tapping into deep emotional wells with only very small displays. 

         A lot of this is supplemented by a very effective soundtrack by James Horner. (Yes, the same guy who gave us “My Heart Will Go On” also gave us “Roll Back the Rock.”) But most of it comes back to the film’s strong instincts for emotional storytelling. There’s one scene I’ll study as an example, the scene where Louie meets the dinos. 

    See, the thing that convinces Rex in particular to go along with Professor Neweyes’ assignment is hearing the wish of a young kid who dejectedly admits he wishes he had a friend. And when these dinos crash onto Louie’s makeshift boat, the audience immediately realizes that this is the same kid. Rex doesn’t make the same connection though until a little later. The narrative weaves in a storybeat when Rex lands his ginormical self in the water and starts to drown. Louie does some quick thinking and uses a mechanical crane to fish him out.

And it’s after this moment of charity where Rex sees Louie’s face reflected in a bubble, echoing the bubbles from the wish radio, and he recalls the wish he heard and realizes this is the same kid. This is when Rex realizes that this little runaway who just saved his life needs his own kind of saving and where Rex understands that this kid is why he accepted the mission in the first place. And the way the moment is illustrated comes naturally with animation. Anyone who's seen like the "Pink Elephants on Parade" segment from Tim Burton's Dumbo can attest to how some things can be mystifying in animation and just fall flat in framework of live-action filmmaking.

But I think a huge part of why this moment works is that it comes down to the fact that the emotion of the situation is built on very simple principles of revelation and anticipation. We’ve just seen that this punk has a heart, because we just witnessed him do a heroic thing in saving Rex from drowning. And so, the film grants us this moment where we are allowed to speculate on just how big it is, and what someone like Rex has to offer by granting his wish to give him a real friend.

IF (2024)

        Again, this kind of sentimentality is also really hard to pull off in practice--a lot harder than many filmmakers want to think. Lots of filmmakers display some curiosity for childlike faith. But very few know what that looks like in practice or how to get their audience to lower their guard in order for them to receive it. I’m going to illustrate this by discussing a comparable film: An American Tail, released in 1986. 

These two films landed similarly with critics, though An American Tail still found advocates from the likes of the Washington Post and the Sun Sentinel. But An American Tail also found much more financial success than many of its peers, outgrossing Disney’s The Great Mouse Detective released the same year. I bring this up because for all its success–its sequel, “Fievel Goes West” was actually the first film out of Amblimation–An American Tail has many of the same narrative issues that would penalize “We’re Back!” not even ten years later. Part of what this affirms to me is that "We're Back!" really wasn't behaving far differently from other animated films from this era, it was just one of the first to be left behind after movies like Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast showed audiences just how good animation can be.

         I will also say upfront that we all owe something to Don Bluth for keeping animation alive during a time when it was very much paddling without a lifejacket. There are specific things that I can appreciate in this film, and his larger body of work. Even so, I do have many, many gripes with this film. One thing I’ll zero in between the two films is how they both handle sentimentality within the character arcs of their respective protagonists.

         On paper, Feivel Mousekowvitz, the Russian mouse-child emigrating to America with his family, should be the more endearing lead, but I actually find this kid super annoying. He has all the expected handicaps of a child character—that kid cannot anticipate a dangerous situation to save his life—without for a moment reminding me of the magic of childhood.

         Characters who are supposed to represent this uncontaminated vessel of light generally work best when they have some foil character to play off of. Think Grumpy and Snow White, or much later, Flynn Rider to Rapunzel. Even if you’re looking at media aiming for adult audiences, think of like Roy Kent to Ted Lasso. Having some templar of cynicism to play against is key to making your torchbearer of faith feel like a whole person. That is how we know they are making a choice to be benevolent, and that it isn’t just some programming that they’re stuck with.

But while Fievel’s peers don’t necessarily share his enthusiasm, they also don’t really have that cynicism to challenge Feivel, and neither are his relationships to these characters very well developed anyway. So Feivel isn’t really overcoming anything or proving anyone wrong. His mission to prove the resilience of children winds up feeling wasted, and gimmicks like his squeaky voice wind up feeling like a sales tactic. 

         Louie works much better as a protagonist. Louis is our token for childhood, yes, but he’s very much at a crossroads. Our first impression of Louie is that he’s kind of a punk. The futility of his “I’m gonna strike out on my own and be a man now" mentality is very much on display, and he calls the dinosaurs who crashed into his boats a bunch of “morons” within like a minute of meeting them. But this grumpiness is counterintuitively why he works so well as a point of contact.

Unlike Feivel, Louie isn’t this pillar of innocence. He has that spark of tenderness to him, but he is also beset by a kind of youthful restlessness that would have him grow up too fast. That’s why he insists he doesn’t need anyone. He’s much closer to someone like Jim Hawkins from Treasure Planet than Feivel. Louie doesn’t need some other character to articulate this conflict because that conflict exists inside of him already. And this gives our encounters with him some kind of suspense. Will Louie ultimately be true to that light, or will he try too hard to grow up that he loses something essential?

         And so hearing something as universal as “Gee, I wish I had a friend” echoing as this sort of disembodied wish that Rex becomes privy to, is a much more effective means of lowering our guard than anything Feivel does. Drawing our attention to Louie’s vulnerability, to something Louie doesn’t want to admit he has, does a very effective job at helping us to form an emotional bond to these two, and the pay-off of this echoes across some very pivotal moments later on.

         Louie is making a very foolish choice when he runs out to stop Rex from eating The Professor. He has no reason to believe that this is going to make any difference or that his friend is going to remember him. This is something you’d only expect to see from a kid who has no self-preservation instinct. But his motivation here reveals a lot about what it is that makes children feel invincible.

    Louie isn’t thinking about his own self-preservation here. He is thinking that he doesn’t want to see this guy—who does not deserve to live—get eaten, and he does not want his friend to darken his soul by obeying his savage programming. And making this bid for humanity has Louie unfolding all those layers of imperviousness he has surrounded himself in. This is where Louie gets to correct that tainted belief that growing up was a matter of burying your heart. Him trying to rescue his friend like this is the most grown-up thing he could do.

I still get teary-eyed watching Louie beg Rex not to be one of those guys who’s always making the world a worse place, to be yet another thing that causes him disappointment. This is the one part of the film the narrative has actually established very, very well. And so this whole exchange lands a million times better than most of what has come before it. (Even with Cecelia in the background screeching “Let no bad happen!”)

         And that’s the whole plague with this film. It’s one giant heart that doesn’t know where to put itself.

 

"It's Just a Cartoon" ...

         Back in 2022, The Hollywood Reporter hosted a roundtable of masters in the field of Animation. There were a couple of excerpts that I think about quite a bit. Norah Twomey, co-founder of Cartoon Saloon, shared this, for example,

Song of the Sea (2014)

“Talking as a mom, children have a special relationship with drawing. They see it as a method of figuring out the world, a method of communication, a method of making some kind of meaning from the chaos. I think that’s incredibly wonderful …

“But there are ways of respecting that audience, and especially children, who I don’t think should need this kind of gloss over stories, which are really good companions that get you through really tough times, no matter what age you are.”

Guillermo Del Toro, who at the time was promoting his Pinocchio adaptation, added,

April and the Extraordinary World (2015)

“And at some point, animation was entertaining all audiences. And it wasn’t until it started to make ungodly amounts of money through younger audiences that it started to veer toward being bad in North America. But in Europe, and in places like Japan, places like Britain, it preserved some of its identity as an art form and a medium. I believe in terms of themes and tone and ambition, we shouldn’t be reined in to being a McNugget when we want to make a five-course meal.” 

         A part of this animation stigma persists even through today. Gatekeepers have no curiosity for all the varying applications of animated filmmaking which extend far beyond just media specifically for children—though neither do they afford due attention and credit for the many films which willfully choose to fit into that class and still accomplish something profound and beautiful. And this is part of the reason why you have members of The Academy who won’t even watch the nominees for Best Animated Picture and just vote for whatever their five-year-old wants.

  As always, it is difficult for me to discuss “the animation genre” because I know that lots of people within the animation field find it really patronizing to think of animation itself as a “genre.” But when I look at the life cycles of other modes of film you do occasionally catch onto certain patterns that potentially bode well for something like animated film. “Horror,” for example, has faced an uphill battle for legitimacy in the eyes of the elites, but as that class has laid roots in the body of the culture, that genre has also been able to receive wider appreciation from those in charge of curating culture. Hence, this last Oscars cycle saw tremendous recognition for movies like Sinners or Weapons.

Forgotten Island (2026)

    While there is still room to grow, I can be grateful that there is more recognition for the medium than there were in decades past, and that Disney is only one contributor to this harvest. There are also specific reasons to believe this is finding its way to animation and cartoons. I am dropping this piece some days before the resurrection of Coyote vs. Acme, and also with some very interesting animated films still on the dock for this calendar year.

         We’re Back! a Dinosaur’s Story was this weird little thing that got lost in the last frontier of imagination. But even at its patchiest, it remains capable of drawing out emotions in me that are textured and multi-faceted. Part of what this reveals to me is that animated films are not some lower-hanging fruit on the filmmaking tree. They require their own special care for handling and eye for excellence. 

    Cultural gatekeepers generally show little interest in opening up the gates to wider ranges of storytelling. That’s true of animation, that’s true of many modes of film. But seeing just how wide the influence has been across history, how it grows, and the journey it’s taken to get there, one can’t help but imagine that the time isn’t so far off that the doors start to open, even if we have to crack them open ourselves just a little.

                 --The Professor