"A couple of beats into the story, we suddenly find ourselves in a live-action environment, with a real human sitting in a dark basement studio, working away, drawing cartoons the self-same cartoon, in fact, that we've just been watching. The artist is then interrupted by an extremely grating woman think Joan Cusack's deranged hyper-girly Debbie Jellinsky in Addams Family Values who demands that he erase his existing creations and create something marketable and cute."
"Diplo the dinosaur loses his parents, and somewhat irritating though he is, it's a little bit heartbreaking that he believes the destruction of everyone and everything he has ever known to be his fault. The meta fiction continues with the erasure of the kookier or more abrasive characters to make way for something more palatable and commercial and to give the film additional thematic resonance animation, after all, being the moving-image genre most affected by the lure of the cute."
Diplo: The Mighty Dinosaur begins with familiar children's-animation tropes: a sincere dinosaur lead, a would-be wizard sidekick, and assorted critters. The film then shifts into live-action, revealing a human animator in a dark basement studio drawing the very cartoon being watched. An abrasive woman demands the animator erase unmarketable creations and produce something cuter, triggering the systematic erasure of characters. Diplo loses his parents and is left believing he caused their destruction, producing a heartbreaking moment. The film critiques the commercial pressure to sanitize animation but falters because the characters often lack the charisma to sustain audience attachment.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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