Daikyouryuu Jidai

Psst, hey kid. Yeah you. You fancy some old school anime and like dinosaurs? Oh boy, I got something for ya'. This movie comes from the late Shoutarou Ishinomori; author of Cyborg 009 and Gilgamesh that was released in July 1979. You probably haven't heard of it before. Why watch over 1.000 episodes of One Piece when you can watch this masterpiece and get your hopes and dreams towards the future get shattered in a million pieces! Let's go!

Story: 4/10 Bad

What story? Oh, you mean this story about a bunch of kids are taken to the end Cretaceous Period; (the Maastrichtian) to be exact by ... an unidentified flying object. This is supposed to be an adventure sci-fi adventure or something with a good moral message at the end. I think. I sort of can guess why Shoutarou Ishinomori made this in the first place, I mean, he's the author of Cyborg 009 and Gilgamesh; which seems his most known manga/anime adaptation in modern times according MAL statistics. It might have been populair back in the end 70's - early 80's in Japan, but nowadays? I don't think so. I mean, I know pretty much all kids love dinosaurs, but there's so much better dinosaur content these days aimed for that demographic.

Art: 6/10 (Fine)

Visual-wise for the time being it looks pretty decent. Maybe you might be thinking; "Dude, this shit is from the end 70's. This looks like dog shit!" Yeah and who knows maybe you're right but still for me that's still pretty much the only positieve thing I can say over this film. It look alright to me for being made in the end '70's which is currently as of this writing more then 40 years ago! Maybe that's something? Maybe it's just because of Toei Studio. That's also maybe the reason. They can make good drawings; if they are motivated enough that is and you could tell most of the time they were motivated enough when drawing the prehistoric animals more in detail.

Sound 4/10 (Bad)

Not really sure what I can say about the audio, but did I enjoy the OST? Not really to be honest. It felt a bit lacking for sure. I haven't watched that much older movies from this time period, but I'm pretty sure it went in the direction of stereotypical soundtract usage of these "dinosaur" movies and those giant animal monster movies from around '60's. Yeah, it's bad for sure. I'd say pass in my books. Voice acting wasn't being good either and the music tracks being used also sort of raised an eyebrown which sure was a bit odd. It is what it is, I guess.

Charathers: 4/10 (Bad)

The charathers, well, there all very basic from what I've seen. Bland I even could say. It's just a young boy with a bit of femine side named Jun, a young girl about the same age named Remi and a smaller boy named Chobi. All pretty bland to me. Nothing really special. Kind of a shame they were so bland. What character development you say? I mean, this is a slightly over one hour long film. You really can't do much with that ammount of time.

Enjoyment: 3/10 (Very Bad)

I can't really say I truly enjoyed this movie. It was rather difficult to go trough, but hey, at least it wasn't as horrible compared with all the past Jurassic World movies that recently got released that keeps getting worse the more people are producing those. Yes, I'm going to mention something about "the science" here being brought up. They really left out a lot of things when this film was talking about the Earth 5 billions years ago and suddenly we are in Archean Epoch, followed by the Cambrian, the Devonian, yada yada... Oh boy. My brain did hurt during that sement. Big yikes. Yes, I'm aware this film is probably meant for childern but still my head did hurt. Also I have noticed quite some species being pictured that for sure weren't present during the Maastrichtian of the Cretaceous, but I'm not going to name them to avoid spoilers. You'll hopefully figure out which species I'm pointing at and hopefully make you curious.

Sure, I also can say some stuff sure has evolved regardless of knowledge in paleontology that used to be correct like at the time people were thinking a certain pretty well known dinosaur smashed their heads together in a full head-on collision in order to get the female. Back in the 1900's people were thinking dinosaurs sure did walked upright if they were able to walk bipedal and I sadly even can say even kids today do think the same, so I honesty can't really blame Shoutarou Ishinomori for making the same old mistake because I know he's wasn't an autodidact paleontologist at all for sure, which is not really a shame at all.

Now allow me to correct some things and I could say a lot of therapods should have had feathers and the cause of the extinction of the dinosaurs, well, we're sure that 66 million years a approx. 10 kilometer wide asteroid smashed into the Yucatán Peninsula during Spring time of the North Hemisphere, which was a devastating impact which knocked out the ecosystem out of course for sure for a while. But those inaccuracies I can manage to see in between the fingers since the knowledge of modern paleontology keeps evolving as well. Almost every days something gets discovered and for your average paleontology connaisseur it's hard but exciting to keep up with all the new discoveries. It's just a damn shame mainstream media refuses to catch on what the scientis are saying and just keep making the same mistakes over and over just because they want dinosaurs to be monsters instead of real animals that inherited this planet for a good whopping 170'ish million years in total. So yeah, if you're planning in watching this for the science (which you should not); do yourself a favor and go watch the documentary 'Prehistoric Planet' (2022) instead. It even has dinosaurs with lips; which is slowly being considerd correct nowadays!


Overall: 4/10 (Bad)

All in all, I personally don't think you should give this a go, but also don't want to be that critical either and butcher this into the ground. Be my guest if you want to watch something that's for sure truly being forgotten and you like prehistoric animals and you are ablle to see past all the huge errors that were being made and want to end this movie with a good moral message. Did that moral message did any justice? Well, I get it what Shoutarou Ishinomori wanted to spread out, but that's it. Did it any justice though? That's up to you to decide.

This movie single handedly broke me.
I just can't first lets start off by saying you will never find out any meaningful information about the characters motivations in the film itself. strike 1

The film continuously uses the same frames repeatedly or animates rain in one scene and switches to a generic filter in the next. strike 2

This film would make a great addition to the Kent Hovind literature for his delusional congregation because this film contains every inaccuracy and misinformation tactic used by Kent like using the word theory like its colloquial use when talking about scientific hypothesis'. Its a very slippery slope.
Strike 2.

Every Character and ... animal in the film will go off model at least once and characters will talk and when the sound bite ends the mouth doesn't stop moving towards the end of the film even in the original Japanese sub. Strike 3

They gave up animating towards the end of the film and it will become a Google slides presentation, along with the credits that are just pictures of dinosaur bones in their correct posture unlike the film that makes them Brutal beasts that walked upright like a human. Strike 4

Wow I was looking for 3 strikes but 4 that is too much man I do not care if you don't want spoilers DO NOT WATCH THIS!

So, here we have a movie preaching about the malignant tumor that is humanity and how it will ultimately face the same fate as the prehistoric in the movie...if they don't empathize with each other

Well...alright I guess I'll go into more details, and sound less cynical

Here's a 1970s anime movie about some kids transported into the past to observe how the creatures that once roamed the planet lived their brutal, primitive, daily lives

The music is pretty nice, and I would say it kinda has that evangelion feeling where soft sad music plays while the brutal stuff goes on in the background. The kids are ... alright as characters, but they don't really add anything really (Chobi's that pretty annoying bratty character all those older shows always seem to have). The pet dinosaur mascot's...uh well alright if you like that kind of thing.

Not a particular fascinating movie, but if you happen to have about an hour to kill and haven't really seen anything related to dinosaurs in anime in a long time or feel like watching a 70s anime, this movie can be an entertaining watch or something to play in the background