I really want to compare Rex: A Dinosaur's Story to Jurassic Park, because they came out the same year, but it's got more similarities to another Steven Spielberg film: E. T. the Extra-Terrestrial. A kid who has issues with a parent befriends an adorable but similarly lonely creature, and then the kid works to help the creature. Doing some reading into this, both also had creature/special effects done by Carlo Rambaldi.

It starts slow, but once the dinosaur is introduced, it manages to be a lot more fun. I think the simple second act was my favorite, but I did quite like how ridiculous it gets in its final act. There are action scenes, so much slapstick comedy, charmingly not-great special effects here and there, and it also becomes a Christmas movie.

It's all silly, but I found a lot of it very charming. And to say that about a kid's movie I didn't grow up with - and as someone who turns 29 in less than a fortnight - I think that's saying something. Maybe not much, but something, and something's enough. Rex: A Dinosaur's Story is enough.

Rex Kyoryu Monogatari or Rex: A Dinosaur Story was originally written by Masanori Hata and illustrated by CLAMP. It was serialized in the shojo magazine, Kadokawa Shoten: Asuka, in 1993.

Chie (Yumi Adachi) and her paleontologist father Akiyoshi Tateno discover tyrannosaur eggs and one hatches to bring Rex to our time. Chie becomes his friend and protector. The birth of the dinosaur - he comes from the lost continent of Mu! - allows her to be the mother that her own parent Naomi (Shinobu Otake) never was even when that maternal character comes back into her life to study Rex.

At the end, shaman Mr. Shinoda (Fujio Toneda) takes the cute dinosaur back home, perhaps even to find his mother. There's also a long sequence where Rex gets to get in all of the Japanese experience of the holidays, which is watching fireworks and feasting on KFC and Coke. If this were an American movie I would be angry at all the product placement but here I find it charming.

The scientists even make Rex into a celebrity and make him appear in all sorts of commercials like anyone who gets famous in Japan. One of them, Morioka (Mitsuru Hirata), even attacks the little creature and decides to become a Yakuza and kidnap Rie and her friend for himself.

Director Haruki Kadokawa was a pretty big deal for some time, producing movies like G. I. Samurai, Virus, Sailor Suit and Machine Gun amongst many others, and directing The Last Hero, Heaven and Earth, Aijou monogatari and more. In 1975, he inherited his father's publishing company Kadokawa Shoten and announced a new and ambitious plan for his company. They would produce film adaptations of the best-seller novels and comics of the publishing branch. A few weeks into the release of this movie, Kadokawa was charged with smuggling and embezzling money from his company in order to fund a cocaine addiction. He served two and a half years of a four year sentence, but this movie was pulled from theaters.

He made a comeback and is still making movies.

I loved this movie and if you don't, stop being cynical. It has a dinosaur dressed in a Christmas outfit running and playing in the snow with the little girl who loves him. It made me tear up numerous times and that's what all holiday movies should do.