Tooth and claw: "Dinotasia"

Well, Dinotasia is all very freaky: a stern, Werner Herzog-narrated rebuke to the cuddly Night at the Museum/Walking with Dinosaurs notion that - hey kids! - dinosaurs can be fun. David Krentz and Erik Nelson's animated reconstruction of prehistoric life opens with the camera peering over the fossils in a museum display case, part of what our Teutonic narrator insists is "science's obsession with order". He goes on: "But if the bones could rebel, where would they take us?" This being Herzog, we can be fairly certain it will be in the direction of chaos, bloodshed and terminal destruction, rather than The Land Before Time; one suspects the director found the merciful dinos of Terrence Malick's Jurassic period somewhat wussy. The Herzog of Dinotasia is keener to stress "Eden does not exist here", and - to prove his point - Krentz and Nelson repeatedly cut away to outer space, and the approach of the fateful meteor that would wipe out most of the life on Earth up to that point.

These dinosaurs were doing a pretty good job cancelling one another out already, we gather. Rendered using fair-to-middling computer effects, these beasts tear at their rivals' necks and bellies. A giant toad swallows one poor Gertie whole, and gets stomped on by a brontosaur for its troubles; an avian creature slingshots its young off the edge of a cliff in the (in turns out vain) hope they will somehow intuit how to fly before they splat onto the rocks below; one hefty, T-Rex-looking fucker smacks a smaller contemporary about the face with its tail, shattering its teeth and reducing its jaw to a limp flap. I believe the Picturehouse chain has Dinotasia lined up for Kids' Club screenings; parents may want to think twice before subjecting especially sensitive youngsters to it, unless you particularly wanted to have your offspring schooled in Darwinian survival techniques.

Whizzing around the globe from one time period to the next without the burden of context, it's basically one set-piece after another: the highpoint may be the episode involving a dinosaur who snacks on a mushroom and starts woozily tripping (to the accompaniment of sitar music!) while trying to flee a couple of predators, which is an incredibly cool thing to discover in the middle of a PG-rated movie, but one which may have no basis whatsoever in fact. The mild fascination the film exerts is that of those speculative Discovery Channel fillers that for some inexplicable reason seek to pit the Vikings against the IRA, or the Baader-Meinhof gang against the Hottentots; I don't think we learn much more from it than you wouldn't want to get on a dinosaur's wrong side - or want Werner Herzog to babysit your kids. 

Dinotasia opens in selected cinemas from Friday.