This anime is part of my Année Anime 2024 Challenge.
This all-ages dinosaur anime follows the story of a young T-Rex named Heart, who was raised from an egg by a plant-eating dinosaur as one of her own children. Heart, alienated from others of his own kind as well as from the rest of the herbivore herd that raised him, finds history repeating itself when he finds becomes the adopted father of an adorable, newly hatched herbivore he was about to eat before it called him Dad. This charming film is about love, compassion, and the urge to nurture, in full knowledge of complications, differences, and paradoxes.
Title: You Are Omasou / You Are Delicious / Heart & Yummie
Anime Type: Film
- Total: 95%
- Static Art: 100%
- Animation: 100%
- Audio: 95%
- Plot: 90%
- Narrative: 90%
- Integrity: 90%
- Delight: 100%
- Genres: Family, Anthropomorphic, Coming of Age, Parenthood
- Merits: Gorgeous Animation, Charming, Warm, Compassionate, Vibrant
- Flaws: Bad End Credit Music
The beginning of the film is spent with Heart as a newly hatched, innocent, and vulnerable child. Heart is not aware he’s different than the rest of his herd, but is troubled by urges and hungers he doesn’t understand. His family, however, is warm and caring, and both his mother and his only brother love him deeply. As Heart finds out more about himself, and comes into conflict with others of his own species, he navigates the hard emotions and practicalities of teaching himself to hunt and eat meat to survive, living a life alienated from herd who raised him. Finding himself in constant conflict with his own kind, he begins to actively train himself to be stronger than those who would outnumber him. It’s honestly pretty fun to watch the little t-rex doing training montages.
Heart’s adopted infant, a little hard shelled dinosaur with a tiny clubbed tail, got named Omasou, which is Japanese for “tasty” or “delicious.” It was the first thing Heart called it upon hatching, just as he was about to eat it, and Omasou just assumed that was its name. Heart raises Omasou the best he can, and I confess I love the scene of Heart teaching Omasou to roar, with Heart’s bellowing, reverberating shouts followed by the tiny baby Omasou “Aoouu-ing” their little heart out.
This film is about what it means to be a loving parent in unexpected circumstances, first with Heart, then again with Omasou. Heart was raised by a mother who could not hope to teach him how to survive as a meat eater or predator; she simply loved him. Heart finds himself falling in love with Omasou, despite all the obvious differences and difficulties. It’s all a bit crazy, but crazy things happen, and love exists within a dimension of its own logic.
The art is beautiful, vibrant, and expressive. The landscapes, from verdant forest, to bright, arid plains, to gnarled scrub brush, are textured and lovely. The dinosaur art style is rounded and warm; cute without being “babyish” or over-the-top cutesy. The animation is also stunning. It’s smooth and fluid, and doesn’t draw attention to itself, while doing a great job expressing action and sentiment alike.
The audio is also great. The music is quite family-blockbuster-orchestra stuff but it works in context, though I admit I can’t stand the end credit music, which is so saccharine and schmaltzy it makes my teeth hurt. The audio effects and backgrounds are top notch, and the little hard shelled baby Omasou makes the most adorable walking sounds.
This film is a delight to watch and I would recommend it to any canon of films to show to your family or kids, whatever age, shape, or dinosaur they might be.
As a side note, an alternate title for the film is Heart and Yummie, which I think is a dumb name for a film. I prefer the partial Japanese title, or even calling it “You Are Delicious / Tasty / Yummy / etc,” a more direct translation of the original title in Japanese, would have made more sense. It seems it’s primarily distributed through the Heart and Yummy title in English, however, so you can all thank whichever self-involved, middle-class, barely literate, moron with a house full of mason-jar wine glasses and a faux-rustic, wooden sign hanging in their kitchen that says “God Bless This Mess,” whose Instagram feed is probably full of soft white filters and fair-skinned skinny women who can’t stop laughing at balloons or white lace doilies cut into the shape of an average American family with 2.5 kids, whose wallet is full to bursting with Starbucks gift cards they “collect,” who probably go on vacation every year to tropical, all-inclusive resorts where they marvel at the size of their steaks and haggle with the local population on the price of cheap plastic souvenirs they don’t realize were made in China and don’t know are based on movies that don’t have anything to do with the cultural landmark they visited, who probably decided they should call this film “Heart and Yummy” between bouts of throwing up their oversized margaritas on the beach and wondering how much they should tip their masseuse if they’re “really ethnic.”
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