You Are Delicious Review – 87,5/100

You might be wondering why I’m giving such a high rating to kiddie movie about a bunch of cartoonishly drawn dinosaurs. Believe me, I’m just as surprised as you are. For those of you who don’t know: Omae wa Umasou da (or You are Delicious!) is a project consisting out of a TV-series and a Movie, based on a picture book about a Tyrannosaurus who takes care of a baby Ankylosaurus. The TV-series was just… bad. Incredibly childish and ludicrously poorly animated. It really was aimed at children of two or three years old. Because of this, I also was just planning to only check out a few minutes of this movie before giving it a pass.

Now, the reason why I liked this movie so much is riddled with spoilers, so I’ll try as much as possible to avoid them. There is one thing however that I do want to warn about, considering the circumstances currently in Japan, and that is the huge amount of dead bodies that are shown in this movie. The creators really don’t shy away from the fact that dinosaurs eat each other and even innocent children aren’t except to this rule (au contraire, in fact). On top of that, a volcano also erupts during the airtime. Be aware of this when watching this movie, because the disasters that happen in this movie are in no way meant to be compared to what happened in Japan with the Tsunami. Regardless of whatever stories anime tried to tell, what happened in Japan is truly horrifying, and let’s hope for a steady recovery for everyone involved.

You are Delicious isn’t really a kids’ movie. It’s more like something for the whole family: it’s got cute dinosaurs for the younger viewers, but it also really doesn’t shy away from serious themes as prejudice, killing for a living, and parenting. It really can get quite mature when it wants to and unlike most other movies of its kind, it doesn’t dumb itself down. It has its silly moments, but by far the biggest purpose of this movie is telling a serious story, and taking itself and its audience seriously in the process.

Now, let me try to explain this in the least spoilerific way: the amount of character development in this movie is huge for movie standards. The premise of this movie is about a Tyrannosaurus Rex taking care of a baby Ankylosaurus, but there is much more to the story than just that. It even puts in effort to make its downright impossible scenario actually plausible. I’m not going to spoil the way in which it does that, you’ll have to watch the movie, though. Let me just say that the cast of characters ends up with a ton of depth and wonderfully fleshed out with especially the lead character being a joy to watch.

Obviously it doesn’t aim to be the most realistic movie: heck, it has giant dinosaurs doing somersaults and other kinds of battle moves. At the same time though it has a ton of these nice details that make it surprisingly down to earth, like those long neck dinosaurs getting dizzy when they they lift their heads too high. Plus, the fancy attack moves make for some really sweet choreography in the action scenes.

There have been more of those “Wolf and Sheep” stories before, but these all had their share of flaws. The amazing thing about You are Delicious is that I have almost nothing I can criticize it for. I mean, by comparison, Chirin no Suzu was very melodramatic; this movie instead manages to keep its balance between hard-hitting drama and subtle characterizations. Arashi no Yoru ni had a simple message that it was a little too keen on portraying. This movie has multiple strong messages that are all more than they seem and that it doesn’t try to shove down the viewer’s throat.

This movie really took me by complete surprise. I’t quite possibly the biggest surprise I’ve seen in years. Being based on a picture book of all things, I can only imagine how much extra the creators put into the story of this movie.

Suggestions:
– Chirin no Suzu
– Heartcatch Precure – Hana no Miyako de Fashion Show… desu ka?
– Kappa to Coo to Natsuyasumi