'The Missing Link' - sometimes known as 'B.C. Rock' and 'Le Chaînon Manquant' - this is a daringly different sort of animated comedy no matter the title, focusing on the world's very first homo sapien, who eventually teaches his people how to walk, talk and make fire after many adventures with dinosaur friends. The humour varies in effectiveness with lame moments as the prehistoric humans repeatedly fail to copulate and attempt to walk in the strangest possible ways. There is a lot of ingenuity to the film too though with the protagonist inadvertently inventing the wheel and accidentally inventing the skipping rope. There are also fun references to movies such as '2001: A Space Odyssey' and stories such as 'Gulliver's Travels'. Some of the prehistoric beasts that appear in the film are wonderfully imaginative too, such as a species of feminine felines with long red tails and one-legged creatures that hop back and forth. And on the subject of beasts, the protagonist also manages to teach a confused dragon how to breathe fire! The characters here are not much to write home about, and bits and pieces of the film feel terribly juvenile, but the movie's tenacity to twist conventional theories of evolution, even bringing religion into the equation at one point (!) is no small feat, plus the film is genuinely touching at times with the protagonist's attempts to locate others of his own species.
