Annecy Review: ‘Diplodocus’ is a Peculiar Meta Story About Creativity
by Alex Billington
June 20, 2024
Yet another animation creation unlike anything ever seen before. The Polish animated film Diplodocus is finally finished & ready to wow everyone. It just premiered at the 2024 Annecy Film Festival in the out-of-competition Annecy Presents section. Director Wojtek Wawszczyk has been working on this project for years, and was able to finish it with financing help from the Polish Film Institute. At first glance, Diplodocus seems like another generic animated film about a super cute little green dinosaur known as Diplo, or Dip, short for “Diplodocus” (of course). I’ve already seen some critics comparing it to Pixar’s The Good Dinosaur (2015), though only because the characters look the same. It also reminds me of the 1988 classic The Land Before Time, also about talking dinosaurs. But in reality, it’s nothing like either of these films. Diplodocus is exceptionally ambitious. It’s a half live-action, half-animated tale of a precocious, adventurous dinosaur and his strange friends hopping through different universes trying to get their creator to not erase them and turn them into cute, easy-to-sell characters. It is a massively charming, odd movie that defies any categorization.
Diplodocus is written and directed by Wojtek Wawszczyk, an animator who has worked in the VFX industry in addition to developing his own short films and directing the 2011 feature film Jez Jerzy previously. It’s based on and/or inspired by Tadeusz Baranowski’s legendary comic book from the 80s. Though it’s really an imaginative modern story about creativity and artists, and how tough it is to stay true to your passions, to believe in what you really love creating. Though I might say it is actually about how hard it is to give up on your passions, how these personal creations won’t let you move on. The story follows (in live-action “real life” footage) a comic book creator / artist named Ted, starring Piotr Polak in the role. He’s always wanted to make a comic book about this little green dinosaur character he came up with as a kid called Diplodocus. Despite being part of the way through creating the book, his publisher has decided otherwise, and tells him to erase & scrap the project. She wants him to create a “super sweet and cute” character like a kitty with big, glittering eyes. It’s an on-the-nose reference to how much it sucks to make art for corporations nowadays.
The story also introduces us to the little guy Diplodocus, created as a conventional 3D animated character. At first all he wants to do is escape his swamp and go see the world, but his parents won’t let him, it’s just too dangerous out there. Then the movie makes a big, bold twist when suddenly these two worlds combine – as Ted starts erases all of his sketches, Dip’s world begins to be erased as well. It’s a movie-within-a-movie meta concept, literally showing the eraser marks in the animated world. But Dip escapes because he has this crazy ability to exclaim “I don’t want to be here anymore” and magically teleport into a multiverse realm. He drifts through space and time, looking at all of Ted’s creations, eventually re-appearing in one of these other worlds. Each one shows how imaginative and beautiful creativity can be, because there’s so many different things going on in each one. It’s like Everything Everywhere All at Once, but for comic book artists. Along the way Dip makes a few new friends: Lord Hocus Pocus, Professor Nervekowski, and Entomology, who join him traveling through these universes as they try to stop the “blankness” from taking over. It’s pretty wild.
I did not expect this cute dinosaur movie to be a multiverse-hopping, comic book artist meta, delightfully clever, convention-breaking animated ode to creativity and staying true to your quirks. Dip is the cutest, I could feel how much he loves this character, making him so lovable. And you’ll never look a rectangular sun the same way again. This movie proves all over again that animation (and comic books) is still one of the best mediums for limitless creativity. There are a few issues, however, mainly with the performance by the actor playing Ted in the live-action segments. He’s really overdoing it, hamming it up in an off-putting way. It’s hard to watch a few of his scenes, even if I get why he’s so dramatic. And there’s the peculiar characters Dip meets along the way – Hocus Pocus is so weird & annoying (his voice is jarring) it’s hard to like him, yet he’s a key part of the story. Though it’s interesting to consider that this criticism is part of the movie’s meta concept – it’s trying to remind us that artists will create whatever quirky characters they want and we have to go with it. I admire all this ambition and creativity so much, and I admire how Diplodocus takes us on a trippy journey to teach us a lesson about embracing peculiarity, which makes it all a worthwhile experience.
Alex’s Annecy 2024 Rating: 7.5 out of 10
Follow Alex on Twitter – @firstshowing / Or Letterboxd – @firstshowing
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