The Disney filmmakers blend sap and melodrama, but not in the sardonic manner of "Bambi Meets Godzilla" nor even in the deft show-biz mode of latter-day Disney favorites. The hero's name is Aladar (he's voiced by D.B. Sweeney), but this movie is no "Aladdin." I assume the biggest laughs will come from the wisecracks in the theater, when tougher kids drawn to the film's bone-crushing spectacle will start recycling elephant jokes: "What's that brown stuff between the dinosaurs' toes?" "Slow lemurs."

At its best, Disney animation in any era has triumphed by putting the joy of movement into storytelling. But "Dinosaur" has little story at all, and what's there is bare-bones and static -- you might say fossilized. This film isn't cut-to-the-chase: It's cut-to-the-trek. The good stuff comes right at the beginning, with our introduction to the film's main villains, the flesh-eating carnotaurs. One of these gargantuan beasts, with reddish skin and devilish horns, chews up Aladar's iguanadon mommy while he's still in the egg. Diverse scaly creatures, including fleet-footed and peculiar reptile poultry, play hot potato with the orphaned ovum until a Pteranodon drops it onto Lemur Island. Aladar looks cute when the egg cracks open, but lemur grandpa Yar (Ossie Davis) still wants to smash him -- until lemur mama Plio (Alfre Woodard) protests. Instantaneously, family feeling overcomes everyone, including crusty old Yar.

The movie jumps ahead to a grown Aladar frolicking with his lemur cousins before these mammals match off in a courtship ritual. With the sexual sadism of a slasher movie, fireballs from a cataclysmic meteor shower dispatch any young lemur who successfully mates. Aladar and his adopted mom and granddad make it to the mainland only with the misfit Zini and the youngster Suri.

Once Aladar meets up with a multibreed herd of herbivores trying to outstrip lurking 'raptors and Carnotaurs and get to the happy nesting ground -- a land of water and grass, if not milk and honey -- his fate becomes clear. Not only will he demonstrate that even a nice dinosaur can make carnitas out of carnotaurs, but he will also bring the Judeo-Christian tradition into the dinosaur worldview and win all the herbivores away from the cruel Darwinian fatalism of the bullying herd chief Kron (Samuel E. Wright).

Yes, this is one dinosaur movie that a creationist can love. Natural selection be damned! Together with Yar, Plio, Zini and Suri, and two elderly pals, an 80-foot-long brachiosaur named Baylene (Joan Plowright) and a plodding styrachosaur named Ema (Della Reese), Aladar sets out to prove the meek shall be first, every life is sacred and team sacrifice defeats brute force. Aladar eventually converts Kron's lieutenant, the aptly named Bruton (Owen Klatte), to his new way, and wins the love of Kron's own sister, Neera (Julianna Margulies).

For all I know, this story may reflect the deepest spiritual beliefs of directors Ralph Zondag and Eric Leighton and writers John Harrison and Robert Nelson Jacobs and the entire Walt Disney Pictures team. But it has so many echoes of previous Disney cartoons, especially the wilderness extravaganzas -- "Bambi," "The Jungle Book," "The Lion King" and "Tarzan" -- it registers as a hollow audiovisual remix. (If Disney has to keep remaking the same picture, why couldn't it be "Pinocchio"?) And Reese's Ema drawls her lines like a plantation figure from "Song of the South:" When she talks about "birthin' babies" she quotes Butterfly McQueen. As she holds up the tail end of the herd, you half expect her to exclaim (à la Amos and Andy) "Feets don't fail me now!"

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