Dinosaur could have been special. Opening with a beautiful, spectacular sequence of a dinosaur egg finding its way to its eventual hatching site is mesmerizing. With a James Newton Howard soundtrack to fuel it, this seven-minute sequence is amongst the more stunning scenes to ever come out of Disney.

Then the damn things talk.

That opening scene is important for many reasons. It’s apparent that a story could have come out of this without a single spoken line. The music tells the tale, hitting the highs during danger, and the lows during the lighter moments. It shows how special the animation could have been. The pterodactyl flight beats out anything in the Jurassic Park series.

Then the damn things talk.

With humanized faces and corny, predictable dialogue, Dinosaur falls apart. Instead of a unique, stand-out movie-going experience, the film becomes another generic and sub-par animated movie. The absurd story is purely filler, and all of the work done to make the creatures look spectacular against the live action backgrounds is wasted.

The plot revolves around Aladar, an orphaned dinosaur raised by a pack of monkeys. As a comet hits the Earth (whether or not it’s the “one” is never really clear), they’re forced to relocate to find that one place that somehow managed to avoid being destroyed in the catastrophe. Of course, the promised land exists so everyone can live happily ever after and apparently never die out.

The script hits all the usuals, from delivering a message kids can follow to putting the hero in limited danger everyone knows he’ll escape from. It’s unbearably clichéd, and does nothing original. The Land Before Time series has been delivering this same style of storytelling in the same era for decades. The only difference here is the visuals. Also, the carnivores never apparently evolved enough to speak, only the cute, lovable herbivores. Good for them.

There’s no question that the movie looks good, if not great. The special effects hold up in almost every scene eight years later, but they’re not worth sitting through this tired story to view them. The dinosaurs are nothing more than marketing material, as any creatures could have filled in to tell this tale. It’s a shame this wasn’t something more.