Cretaceous period. Speckles is a little Tarbosaurus living with his mother, older brother and two twin sisters. They hunt and eat dinosaurs through an ambush from their hill. One day, a T-Rex causes a stampede which tramples Speckles' brother to death, his twin sisters fall from a cliff, while the T-Rex kills his mother. Now alone, Speckles wanders through the forest, scavenging for food, like eggs. 10 years later, Speckles is grown up and partners with a female Tarbosaurus, Blue-Eyes. They get three kids in their nest. A volcano erupts, causing a great migration of dinosaurs, and the death of one of their offspring. Blue-Eyes' leg is injured in the cave, so she dies along the way, while Speckles and the remaining two kids have to leave her behind while the scavenger Velociraptors eat her. In another stampede, another of his kids is killed, while the T-Rex attacks again. Speckles kills him in the sea and swims with the last remaining live child back to the shore.
A combination of computer-animated dinosaurs set in the background of live action landscapes, Korean adventure drama "Speckles: The Tarbosaurus" (also translated as "Dino King") gives a distinctively dramatic and emotional depiction of "dinosaur existentialism", unusual and unorthodox in its refusal to present dinosaurs as random beasts, thereby being much closer to "The Land Before Time" than your average dinosaur flick. The surprising thing is that the longer the viewers watch the film, the more they will differentiate the dinosaurs as separate characters: the main protagonist is a Tarbosaurus, Speckles, who starts off as an irresponsible and playful "child", but then becomes an orphan, has to learn how to survive by himself, and ends up as a responsible "father" taking care of his new family. The director Han Sang-Ho uses good camera angles and aesthetic shot compositions to conjure up this prehistoric world (Speckles' mother and their kids observing the valley over the entire horizon; a frog's-eye view of Speckles' legs as he battles a Velociraptor; a bird's-eye view of an apatosaurus running in a herd on a cliff, while the sea is beneath it), in all its harshness and cruelty: one has compassion with Speckles' plight in which he loses his family members both in his era as a child and in his era as a grown-up. Speckles has a child's voice as a narrator in the first third, and then a grown-up voice as a grown up. However, he cannot communicate with others, like his "wife" Blue-Eyes, and thus almost all of his painful experiences and trauma from the past will remain unspoken to others. Somewhat overlong and overstretched, with some thin moments of style, but still realistic and affecting enough to grip the viewers almost as if they are watching a drama.
Grade:++
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