Doctor Who: Dreamland – More or less ten years later

It’s getting close to ten years since Dreamland was broadcast. How well did this Tenth Doctor animation work?

(Image credit: Doctor Who/BBC. Image obtained from: BBC Press.)

Doctor Who and CGI are now pretty much joined at the hip, but what about when we had a fully CG-animated Doctor Who adventure? How did that go again? Let’s journey back a decade to remind ourselves.

Doctor Who takes you throughout all of space and time, but it doesn’t often go into the animated realm for new content much, does it? We had the incredibly badly timed release of Scream of the Shalka and the actually rather nice The Infinite Quest. Along with a few webcasts that contained animation but on a more, say, limited scale. (I’ll watch Real Time eventually). There were even plans for a Saturday morning type cartoon by Nelvana at one point that, for better or for worse, never really went anywhere beyond concept art.

The Doctor and animation don’t really interact as often as you would think they would. I mean, despite all odds we haven’t even gotten some sort of Gotham Knight or Animatrix-style Doctor Who anime anthology, despite how obvious a seller that would be with those punk kids.

Which brings us to Dreamland. Originally aired over six parts, one being 12-minutes, followed by five six-minute episodes, anyone watching it now will most likely be viewing the DVD version, which is all of them edited into one 45-minute episode, cliffhangers be dammed. Let’s go into it in a bit more detail.

The story

Set after the dark somber “ends with a suicide” Water of Mars, but not before The Day of the Doctor (probably, a few novels take place during this time period too), is the fun 50s monster movie homage that is also completely canon called Dreamland. Aspects of it pop up in The Sarah Jane Adventures later too.

The Doctor appears in 1958 Nevada, with a hankering for chili before it is ruined forever for some reason in the 60s. There he meets a blond restaurant owner named Cassie, voiced by David Tennants future wife, and a Native American man named Jimmy voiced by someone who isn’t David Tennant’s future wife Georgia Moffett. Only one of these actors’ names appear in the opening credits.

After noticing that Cassie has a MacGuffin on her counter, they are soon terrorized by some Men in Black, a giant alien bug, and the US Military in quick succession, being eventually taken to Area 51 (surprisingly a first for Doctor Who so far) to have their minds erased of what they saw.

Eventually escaping from the green amnesia gas, the Doctor and his makeshift companions find themselves face to face with something I never expected Doctor Who to ever do. Meeting up with a Tzun stereotypical Grey Alien (voiced by Lisa Bowerman who you are probably familiar with). You know, the Roswell ones or that little symbol you see on certain computers.

Meanwhile it’s revealed the US Military is in league with the bug aliens from earlier (the leader being voiced by David Warner who you’re also probably familiar with), who you can most likely assume are evil. All of this happens in about ten minutes.

What follows is pretty much, and I hate to use the term, non-stop action. Massive alien queens, lots and lots of chase scenes some involving mine carts, that one scene from that one Indiana Jones movie (not the one you’re thinking of, the other one), ANOTHER different type of alien showing up, people flip-flopping allegiances like it’s going out of style. It would all be terribly exciting if the animation was a little bit more… well… let’s get into it a bit.

The animation

The character designs of the humans are somewhat of a mix between those you’d find in Telltale Games, and fondant on a cake shaped vaguely like a person. The animation is also very stiff and arguably worse than the models, but the studio who made it, Littleloud, is now defunct and I’m not really one for speaking ill of the dead more than I have already.

All of the above problems could just be a factor of this having to be made in a rush before Tennant regenerated during the upcoming Christmas two-parter, it’s hard to say. But what I can say is that neither the way people look nor the way people move really distracts from the story (art is subjective, amiright?), and it’s important again to realize that this… was probably fine in 2009, anyway.

Representation

Somewhat out of the left field here but if you don’t mind me saying so, it’s nice to see, if however brief, some Native American representation in this sci-fi media I enjoy. (Phil Ford seems to have an interest in them if Dreamland and his Sarah Jane stories are any indication.) Even if it was ten years ago with shoehorned stuff that turns him from being “the character in the story” to “the Native American in the story”, it’s still nice. It’s more than any Marvel movie has certainly managed.

Not to mention an improvement over something like, say, the First Doctor talking about savage minded Red Indians in the very first episode, wasn’t it? (Keep in mind I’m not suggesting we judge something from the 60s to our modern sensibilities, I’m not an idiot, that was meant as a “we’ve come a long way” type of statement.) Either way, I appreciate it.

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A fine Doctor Who story

Anyway, Dreamland is if nothing else very fast paced, which makes sense given how it was intended to be watched. It’s also a completely fine Doctor Who story. In fact, I would go so far to say everything in this story completely works as intended. (Emphasis on “story”.)

Ignoring everything I’ve already snobbishly said about the animation, I’m unsure if there was actually anything in the story that couldn’t have been done in the live action version of the show itself. Which is often the main reason to make something animated at all. This unfortunately brings into question why this story had to be an animated one in the first place. (Of course this is just a rhetorical question because the answer to these types of things is always just budget and scheduling. Always.)

Well, regardless I’m glad it exists at all, to be frank. And I’m sure you will too, until a character smiles, anyway.

What did you think about Dreamland? Do you think the Doctor should dip into the world of animation more often outside of just reanimating lost episodes (animate the Sixth Doctor’s Big Finish regeneration story already)? How many of you were immediately turned off by me saying Doctor Who and anime in the same sentence? Let us know in the comments below.