Like Disney's classic tale of deer and other wildlife, Dinosaur details a creature's coming of age in the prehistoric wild. The true victory here isn't necessarily in the storytelling, but in the film's impressive look. This is the first time an extensive animated feature has put its stars on a real-life stage. Landscapes of Florida, Venezuela, Hawaii and Australia were filmed, then populated with hundreds of computer-generated prehistoric creatures. The technique will be familiar if you've seen the Discovery Channel's recent hit series, Walking With Dinosaurs .
Dinosaur tells the story of a resilient orphan raised by other creatures.
It's carried many miles by a pterodactyl and dropped into a jungle on an isolated island, where it's discovered by a curious family of furry lemurs. Once the creature comes out of his shell, we discover he's an iguanodon named Aladar. He becomes the oversized baby, and then the child and playmate, of the lemurs. Of course Aladar soon grows so large that his adopted parents and siblings cling to him like birds on the back of a hippo. They swim to the mainland where Aladar finds himself in a herd of all sorts of dinosaurs.