Moonbeam is interesting because with it Band finally admits the childish nature of his comic booky stories and his trademark whimsical tone, now without the irruption of sex and violence present in the average Full Moon outing.
A nauseating sitcom family dynamic is at the center of the picture, injected with the derivative dilemmas of children's fiction, even with a trite and underdeveloped backstory of grief that sometimes comes up whenever the script requires it (this whole "missing parental figure" thing also troubled the child protagonist of The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao (1964), where the void was also filled by a showcase of special effects and stop motion). A charmingly naive fantasy tale done in a post-Spielberg/Dante era, with the rowdy spirit found in the tamest scenes from Gremlins (1984) but without the satirical perversion of childish iconography and subjects. Band's film maintains it's purity and childishness without allowing it to be contaminated by dreadful morbidness, grossness or violence of any kind, every punch and firearm shot is clean and harmless, every "adult" joke is safe and restrained, every conventionally attractive adult that's single falls in love with another one, and every piece falls into place without any problem or trouble. There's no place for verisimilitude in the childish fantasy.
The real stars are obviously the David Allen-made micro-beasts, who engage in the typical disastrous misadventures and cutesy little shenanigans these movies require. Dino-puppies extracted from the likes of Beethoven (1992) and its sequels. Perhaps one of the most interesting things is the way the Bands portray the dino-doggies, with a crushing ordinariness, their reveal occurs with the utmost cinematic casualness, from one shot to another, one cut it's all that's necessary to reveal them, as opposed to the typical Spielbergian procedures seen on Gremlins, where the search for a particular effect and emotion forced the direction to employ shots specifically constructed and timed to convey a certain feeling (the tilted and moody shots of the Gremlins hatching for example) but Band opts to dispose of all of that, never even accentuating an emotion. The reactions humans have to seeing the dinosaurs are no different. There's no true questioning of the little creatures aside from simply pointing out their strange appearance in the house. The small reptiles are shot and framed as simply another element of daily life, inhabiting the frame as naturally as any puppy or cat does. Never seen with strangeness or making them disturb the world created. There's no place for the questioning of the fantastical in the childish fantasy.
The old school model seems transported from the 50's and 60's, mostly untouched, perhaps out of the inability of father Band to adapt to the times, or perhaps the son's nostalgia is the one responsible for such backwardness. As with most of Band's catalog, the core is an old model that becomes slightly modified by the popular tropes of the time, but it's mostly undisturbed by modern sensibilities or worries.
Prehysteria has no objective other than purifying the children's film, while Jurassic Park (1993), Gremlins (1984) and Goonies (1985) pushed the limits of the subgenre, maturing and occasionally pouring a few drops of meanness and intensity into their stories, Band brought back naivety to it, a deliberate and shameless naivety, always conscious of it's tone and with total conviction to it, self conscious but not self deprecating, proud of an obsolete cinematic infantilism.
The best and most fitting start for Moonbeam.
