Dinosaur (2000)

reviewed by
Edward Johnson-Ott


Dinosaur (2000) Voices of D.B. Sweeney, Alfre Woodard, Ossie Davis, Max Casella, Hayden Panettiere, Samuel E. Wright, Julianna Margulies, Peter Siragusa, Joan Plowright, Della Reese. Music by James Newton Howard. Screenplay by John Harrison and Robert Nelson Jacobs, based on an original screenplay by Walon Green. Story by Thom Enriquez, Harrison, Jacobs and Ralph Zondag. Directed by Ralph Zondag and Eric Leighton. 82 minutes. Rated PG, 3 stars (out of five stars)

Review by Ed Johnson-Ott, NUVO Newsweekly www.nuvo.com Archive reviews at http://us.imdb.com/ReviewsBy?Edward+Johnson-Ott To receive reviews by e-mail at no charge, send subscription requests to ejohnsonott@prodigy.net or e-mail ejohnsonott-subscribe@onelist.com with the word "subscribe" in the subject line.

The press kit for Disney's computer animated children's movie, "Dinosaur," contains eight pages of cast and crew biographies, nine pages of credits and 15 pages of production notes. Included in the copious technical section is one paragraph on the actual story, which reveals a lot about the filmmakers' priorities. "Dinosaur" is a 75 minute (82 with closing credits) showcase for computer animation, with a standard issue Disney storyline slapped on. And, despite the jazzy visuals, it's a surprisingly mundane affair.

Of course, the very young target audience for the movie will love every minute of it, but then again, they also look at Lunchables as fine dining.

Set in the late Cretaceous Period, "Dinosaur" chronicles the adventures of Aladar (voice of D.B. Sweeney), an Iguanodon raised by a family of frolicking lemurs after his egg turns up on their island paradise. A meteor shower forces them to flee to the mainland, where they join a diverse group of dinosaurs trudging across the ravaged land seeking a new nesting ground. Aladar's insistence on staying with caravan stragglers like the slow-moving Brachiosaur, Baylene (Joan Plowright), and the brassy Styrachosaur, Eema (Della Reese), draws the ire of Iguanodon herd leader Kron (Samuel E. Wright), even though his sister, Neera (Julianna Margulies), clearly considers the rebellious young dinosaur to be quite a stud.

Think Disney's "Tarzan" minus the exuberance and "The Lion King" with less majesty and you'll know what to expect from the retread plot. Think fuzzy wuzzy and you'll understand the story's philosophy. In the press notes, Margulies states, "The film has a beautiful message, especially for younger viewers, that it's so much cooler to help the weak ones than to go along with the bully who hates everyone and can be mean just because he's more powerful." The villain of which she speaks is Kron, and his crime is driving the herd to a safe haven, even if it means leaving behind those who can't keep pace. Apparently, Disney-think allows no room for distasteful concepts like survival of the fittest.

But enough carping over plot and philosophy – after all, this is a film concerned primarily with cute characters and dazzling visuals. "Dinosaur" strives to raise the bar for computer animation, placing CG characters in real world settings. The production's first unit shot in California's Mohave Desert and in Hawaiian botanical gardens, along with other sites on the Big Island, Maui and Kauai, while the second unit captured images in Australia, Jordan, Venezuela and the beaches of Western Samoa. Animators studied light and shadow with great care, attempting to seamlessly insert their computer generated creations into real backdrops.

Their success rate varies from scene to scene. Some composite images are crisp, sharply defined and remarkably convincing, while others have a creamy, storybook appearance that is far less credible, but still attractive. The most impressive shots are close-ups where the animators obviously strained to break new ground. In the past, computer renditions of water and hair generally ranged from barely passable to flat-out cheesy, but "Dinosaur" gets them right. For scenes of a soggy lemur, fur stylist Charles Colladay dealt with both, explaining "To study wet hair, I experimented at home by wetting down my cats to see what they looked like. The hair comes to thousands of little points and you can see the skin in-between. That gave us some direction to go in and we came up with a hair-clumping tool where we could actually grab a single hair on the computer and clump a bunch of others to our target hair. We went to the zoo to study real lemurs, but they kind of frowned on us wetting them down."

Even though "Dinosaur" periodically breaks new ground, the film suffers from a been-there, done-that feel. Ads for the film trumpet, "You've never seen anything like this before!" Apparently, they forgot about a little feature called "Jurassic Park." When Laura Dern and Sam Neill first saw a dinosaur grazing in the sunshine, rising on its hind legs to snatch some leaves from the top of a tree, my jaw dropped as far as theirs did. I never experienced that sensation during "Dinosaur." I've no doubt that kids will go wild over the movie, but for this adult, the grafting of grandiose images to a Sesame Street storyline left me cold. Scientists theorize that dinosaurs became extinct as a result of Earth being struck by an asteroid. After sitting through this tepid spectacle, I wonder if they simply died of boredom.

© 2000 Ed Johnson-Ott

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