ANIMATION; 1hr 27min
VOICES BY: Justin Long, John Leguizamo, Tiya Sircar, Skyler Stone
Brothers at large: Patchi (left) and Scowler
Patchi (voiced by Long) is a bumbling baby Pachyrinosaurus living the wild life in prehistoric Alaska. Pachyrinosaurus is fancy-pants for thick-nosed lizard. They’re in no way a thing of beauty but the plus-sized lubbers are engineered in meaty, scale-perfect detail by Sydney’s Animal Logic studio and our little guy, at least, is perversely cuddlesome.
The animation is totally the star here, with Patchi, his shrewd bird buddy/narrator Alex (Leguizamo) and crush Juniper (Sircar), being generically chipper, while his big brother Scowler (Stone) is a churl. And since the dinos do little but lumber around and get picked on by other leaping lizards, the plot, in which Patchi grows up, mans up and gets the girl, is nothing out of the box, either. You can’t beat a spellbinding look, though, and the kids in the audience seemed to think so, too. There wasn’t a peep out of any of them: always a beautiful, school-holidays thing.
