Disney Sundays: Dinosaur (2000)

          When Toy Story came out in 1995 it was a huge groundbreaker. No animated film had ever been rendered fully in CG and thus none looked closer to reality! And because of the success of Toy Story, and just generally how fantastic a movie it was on its story and characters as well, it became clear it was only a matter of time before CG animation took over (to some slight detriment to the art in my opinion). And while Pixar began to consistently work on CG animated films, it was wondered when and how Disney itself was going to jump on the bandwagon.
          The first seven minutes or so of Dinosaur, Disney’s first CG animated movie, are incredible! It depicts a nesting ground of herbivores being attacked by a giant carnotaur and the one surviving egg going on a journey between multiple dinosaurs over land and sea set to epic music! The tracking shots are fantastic, the visuals actually pretty good -looking almost Jurassic Park quality; it just creates an amazing sense of wonder in a prehistoric world! …And then the baby dinosaur is adopted by talking lemurs. It’s pretty downhill from there.
          Okay, that may be an over-statement as there are other good moments, but the story is severely less impressive for the duration of the film. And this is coming from someone who loved this movie as a kid. What is the story? Well it’s the same story every prehistoric movie’s been doing since The Land Before Time, from Ice Age to The Good Dinosaur. In the wake of a great meteor shower, an orphaned dinosaur and his adopted family of lemurs set out to find new nesting grounds by joining a ragtag herd while avoiding vicious carnivores. In this situation they also happen to be led by a tyrannical and surprisingly Darwinian asshole.
          I don’t know why every dinosaur movie does this same story but it’s pretty tired. Even in the points where this story varies from the stereotype there are other clichés. The conflict between the hero Aladar and villain Kron is so forced. The latter’s stubbornness in particular only exists so he can doom the herd. Moments like when Aladar and the lemurs escape their island and when the elderly dinosaurs are cut off from the herd seem interesting, but within moments you know how their story is going to play out. I also feel like Aladar being an orphan was unnecessary. Would it have been so hard to just make him a friend of the lemurs? Because as is, it’s not only strange (a kind of dinosaur Tarzan) but makes little sense given his lack of reaction to the other dinosaurs when he meets them. Tarzan’s reaction to other humans was a cornerstone of that movie, here it’s no big deal. The deaths of most of the lemurs is briefly mourned before everyone moves on. And the inclusion of the meteor clearly a reference to the popular extinction theory doesn’t make much sense as it implies the dinosaurs live on long after that. Either that or the ending’s supposed to be ironic. (I did find it funny that Aladar’s reaction to the big extinction event was the same as Keanu Reeves’ reaction to the Matrix) It’s a strange but interesting choice too that Dinosaur seems to go out of its way to not feature any famous marketable dinosaurs. Rather than a T-rex there’s a carnotaurus; instead of an apatosaurus there’s an iguanodon, a styrocasaur instead of triceratops, an anklyosaur instead of a stegosaur. The only notable dinosaurs that appear are a pterodon and a brachiosaur. It’s an interesting choice and makes the film stick out a bit more, but is certainly unusual. Not least because carnotaurs weren’t nearly that big and clearly they were portraying them as traditional tyrannosaurs.
          Most of the characters are also pretty bland but the film does have a few good voice actors. D.B. Sweeney and Juliana Margulies are good actors, but they don’t bring anything to Aladar and Neera -love interests purely because they’re the same species. There’s no chemistry there whatsoever and individually they’re really basic, Aladar who as his name suggests comes off as a bland dinosaur version of Aladdin. Kron’s boring as hell, his sidekick Bruton is actually slightly more interesting, though both are imbued with just a check-list of villain characteristics. Though I do like the irony in how much they believe in survival of the fittest (and random trivia: Kron’s voice actor Samuel E. Wright was Sebastian in The Little Mermaid! Huh?). Eema and Baylene are okay side characters though. I haven’t seen a lot of elderly characters in animated films treated with this level of sympathy. Eema’s voiced by Della Reese while Baylene is Mrs. Laurence Olivier herself -Joan Plowright. But did you have to make the anklyosaur Url (why’s it spelt like that?) a dog? The inconsistency in which dinosaurs can speak is pestering. The lemur girl voiced by a young Hayden Panettiere might as well not exist given she’s got less than a dozen lines, and Zini the goofy wisecracking sidekick, is immensely annoying. The smart-ass who thinks he’s cool is just overall an irritating character type and I was kinda hoping he’d be picked off by those no-longer-scary velociraptors. I like Ossie Davis, but he’s basically just the old grump in this movie. Neither his nor Zini’s comedy ever really works (and this movie is classy enough to bookend itself with pee jokes...). However the saving grace of the voice performances is Alfre Woodard who’s got a voice I can listen to for hours even if her character Plio isn’t well developed. But her narration at the end is a bit off-putting as despite the general happiness of everything, it decides to remind you all these dinosaurs are long dead and we must remember them. It further indicates a kind of tragic irony in this story that maybe the whole journey was for nothing if they’re all going to die out soon. Thanks for that!
          The animation though decent at the time, hasn’t aged well and closer resembles those Walking with Dinosaurs documentaries. It’s not the worst of CG animation but is a far cry from Jurassic Park. In fact I get the feeling that this film was trying to be The Land Before Time with a Jurassic Park visual sense. Even certain scenes like the carnotaur bursting out from the trees to attack and it’s looking into the cave during the rainstorm feel like imitations of scenes from Jurassic Park and The Lost World respectively. But what this movie needed to be was its own thing. As I said, those opening seven minutes are amazing and if it proceeded from there to tell a different kind of story without talking dinosaurs akin to the great “Rite of Spring” from Fantasia, I think this could’ve had the potential to be one of Disney’s finest. 
          In one regard it is among Disney’s finest though: the music. This is a terrific epic musical score by James Newton Howard. He’d go on to write a few more great scores for Disney’s non-musical films, but this one may be the best. You can feel the grandeur of this world, it’s scope and awesome creatures. It perfectly suits that egg journey sequence which also has the films’ best animation, and even his themes for the herd and the dumb, inconsequential monkey mating ritual are pretty great. 
          I think the reason I liked this movie as a kid was because it was MY Jurassic Park. And many others’ of my generation as well. As great as The Land Before Time was, the one disadvantage of the traditional animation was I didn’t believe the dinosaurs were real; and with me being too young to experience Jurassic Park and the CG of this movie being not bad for the time, this was the first time I saw realistic looking dinosaurs in a movie! Every boy it seems goes through a period where they’re obsessed with dinosaurs, and this movie coming at the tail end of mine really had me. But in hindsight, Dinosaur is pretty bad with only a couple redeeming factors despite one hell of a great opening. I’d still like to see a prehistoric-set dinosaur movie done originally and well, but Disney as they’ve proven for a second time with The Good Dinosaur, clearly aren’t the people to do that.

Next Week: The Emperor’s New Groove (2000)