Okay, Rex: A Dinosaur’s Story (1993) by Haruki Kadokawa is a commercially oriented response to Jurassic Park only in commercial terms, because in terms of storytelling it feels more like a cross between Jurassic Park and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial: the fact remains that this obscure Japanese film is about to be screened in the United States for the first time, so someone has unearthed its curious genesis and fate, thirty-three years after an operation that was meant to exploit Western sensibilities and succeeded only up to a point.
Rex: A Dinosaur’s Story, a T-Rex cub by Carlo Rambaldi for a curious venture
The release of Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park in 1993 was clearly understood to be a blockbuster, a real revolution. With devilish timing the Japanese distributor Shochiku countered it in Japan with a homegrown version of the dinosaur myth, namely Rex: Kyôryû monogatari, the international title Rex: A Dinosaur’s Story, to whose production, for the on-set physical effects, even our Carlo Rambaldi collaborated. Yes, it was the very Oscar-winning team for E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial that handled the little Rex, the baby dinosaur, co-starring in this tale alongside a young girl (if you watch the embedded trailer, we bet you’ll understand the plot even without knowing a word of Japanese!). Rambaldi had also won Oscars for King Kong and Alien, but there’s no doubt that this gentle, defenseless Rex is closer to the alien Spielberg brought to myth in 1982. But did the venture succeed?
Accounts say that Rex: A Dinosaur’s Story reached in Japan a box-office result of 2,200,000,000 yen, placing seventh in that year’s revenue chart, therefore with a more than decent outcome… but not enough to recoup its 2 billion yen budget. Perhaps it never had the time, also because Shochiku pulled it from theaters when director Haruki Kadokawa was accused by the U.S. of cocaine trafficking, subsequently sentenced in 1994 to two and a half years in prison (despite his lifelong insistence on innocence).
For the record, Jurassic Park grossed in Japan, in just the first two days of release, nearly $8.4 million (Variety), equivalent to over 900 million yen… There was clearly no contest.
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