"The Ballad of Big Al" is a 29-minute short film from 2000, so this one will soon have its 20th anniversary. It is an add-on for the television show "Walking with Dinosaurs" from one year earlier and Kenneth Branagh is once again the narrator, at least if you listen to the English version. The focus here is on the ill-fated life of a young allosaurus, so if you see the running time of under half an hour here, you may already guess correctly that it was cut short. Also with basically almost everything in here being fiction about the life of a dinosaur, I also would not really call it a documentary. The fact that they made a connection between a skeleton they found recently and a fictitious character is not enough to say it is a documentary. The name Big Al says it all already. This does not mean it's a weak or even bad film though. I mean 2 Emmy wins and a rating above 8 may be a bit on the exaggerated side, but it was an entertaining half hour with a nicely written fictitious plot. We also learn a bit about what life back then must have been like, so the film also delivers on an educational level. Overall, I give it a thumbs-up and it is certainly worth checking out, almost a must see if you got an above-average interest in dinosaurs.
