Dinosaur (2000) – Review

Back in the late 80s, stop-motion artist Phil Tippett recommended to director Paul Verhoeven a “dinosaur picture” that would take a more naturalistic approach to the subject matter, none of that talking dinosaur nonsense found in The Land Before Time, but years later, with Disney Studios now attached, things took a bit a departure from that original vision.

What is interesting to note is that the Tippett and Verhoeven version was going to be a live-action movie with the use of stop motion animation techniques such as puppets, scale models and miniatures to create the prehistoric world – which makes sense considering this plan was originally put together almost a decade before Jurassic Park and CGI dinosaurs changed the industry – but once those two departed the project and Disney became involved the shift towards animation was almost a foregone conclusion. With Jurassic Park proving what could be done with a computer Dinosaurs was greenlit by Disney CEO Michael Eisner but with one even bigger change than simply making it a live-action movie and that would be, on the insistence of Eisner, of having the dinosaurs talk, which made things a bit tricky as the primary character was a duck-billed Iguanodon and those creatures didn’t have lips.

You can’t have a proper love story without lips.

Walt Disney’s Dinosaurs tells the story of a young Iguanodon named Aladar (D.B. Sweeney) who was raised by a kindly family of lemurs after his egg was stolen post-Carnotaurus attack that had driven his herd away. This plot may seem a little familiar as it’s basically that of Tarzan of the Apes only in this case it would be a several ton-sized dinosaur and not an ape-man who would be the central character.  Now, we do get some fun stuff with the gruff but understanding patriarch Yar (Ossie Davis) and his daughter Plio (Alfre Woodard) who decides to raise him alongside her daughter Suri (Alfre Woodard), despite Yar’s initial objections. We also get some comic relief from Zini (Max Casella) who is a rather unsuccessful lemur when it comes to finding a mate, sadly, not getting laid is the least of their problems as a meteor hits and turns their island into a wasteland as its shockwave forces Aladar and Yar’s family flee across the sea to the mainland.

How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Extinction.

The rest of the film follows the broad strokes of Don Bluth’s The Land Before Time with Aladar and his extended family joining a multi-species herd of dinosaur refugees that are heading for the communal Nesting Grounds, all the while being pursued by nasty predators and lack of food, but that isn’t the only conflict in this movie as Aladar must also deal with the herd’s brutish leader, a bully of an Iguanodon named Kron (Samuel E. Wright) whose philosophy is clearly that of only the strong deserve to survive, which sets him into conflict with Aladar because this attitude means leaving behind an old Styracosaurus named Eema (Della Reese), her pet Ankylosaurus Url and her equally elderly friend Baylene (Joan Plowright), the only Brachiosaurus in the group. It’s Aladar and his “No one gets left behind” attitude that makes him a great character and a true hero as well, and this is also the key character trait that catches the eye of Kron’s sister Neera (Julianna Margulies), which provides the aforementioned love story.

Somehow we get a Prehistoric Meet Cute.

Unlike Don Bluth’s animated dinosaur tale this one isn’t done with traditional cel animation but with wonderfully rendered computer animated beasts that look as if they’d stepped right out of the history books, with the bonus element of combining live-action scenery with those computer-generated characters to make the film even more immersive, all which went towards making a truly breathtaking movie with some truly stunning visuals. And sure, the movie plays fast and loose with how these prehistoric animals would act as it tries to anthropomorphize them into characters that we can relate to and fall in love with, which is no easy task considering these are giant lizards with rather stoic facial features. A lot of credit must go to co-directors Ralph Zondag and Eric Leighton who did a stellar job at getting us to become invested in this incredible journey and they are well aided in this task by a fantastic voice cast that really brought these characters to life.

Welcome to Jurassic Park.

Stray Observations:

• The egg containing our protagonist being snatched up by a predatory little dinosaur is a complete lift from Don Bluth’s The Land Before Time.
• The Pteranodon that snatches up the egg with Aladar apparently travelled hundreds of miles to find food for his young, which is weird considering its nest was located right by the ocean and as fish are the prime diet for such creatures that seems like a rather pointless journey.
• Like many dinosaur movies the filmmakers play fast and loose with time and locations as the Brachiosaurus, Iguanodon and Styracosaurus did not exist during the same time period or place.
• As in The Land Before Time plant-eating dinosaurs are shown to be nurturing and loving creatures that can talk while carnivores are depicted as mute and mindless killing machines.

Your typical horror movie monsters.

It certainly would have been interesting to see what the likes of Phil Tippett and Paul Verhoeven would have come up with in their live-action approach, but even Disney’s version was less ambitious, going with talking dinosaurs rather than a more naturalistic approach – many finding that Eisner’s decision to take route undermined all the effort that went into making the dinosaurs look so real – that and the cookie-cutter plot aside Walt Disney’s Dinosaurs is still an eye-popping visual spectacle and whose achievement in the area of computer animation cannot be denied. Later the BBC would create a wonderful a six-part nature documentary series called Walking With Dinosaurs, which would take Tippett’s and Vehoeven’s original concept to its natural conclusion, that all said this particular dinosaur adventure is still an engaging and heartwarming little flick even if a little recycled, and it is a tale that will entertain children and adults alike.