Dinosaur

Dinosaur is a 2000 American live-action/computer-animated adventure drama film produced by Walt Disney Feature Animation with Secret Lab. The film was released by Walt Disney Pictures on May 19, 2000, and is the 39th film and the first computer-animated film in the Disney Animated Canon. At officially $127.5 million, it was the most expensive theatrical movie release of the year.
While all the characters in Dinosaur are computer-animated, most of the film's backgrounds were filmed on location. Several backgrounds were found in Canaima National Park in Venezuela; various tepuis and Angel Falls also appear in the film.
==Plot==
The film opens with a female Iguanodon keeping a close watch on her eggs. A young Parasaurolophus accidentally wakes up a Carnotaurus who started chasing after the herd, and eventually kills a Pachyrhinosaurus. Then an Oviraptor takes the surviving egg then it was taken by a Pteranodon. The Pteranodon drops the egg by accident onto an Island called Lemur Island. Three Lemurs: Plio, Yar, and Zini found the egg when it hatched and then named the baby Iguanodon Aladar.
Years on, Plio has had a daughter named Suri and the family takes part in mating season which Zini fails to accomplish and goes without a mate. Moments after the mating season ends, a huge asteroid destroys the island and leaves only Aladar and his closest family members confirmed to be alive. The family move on and after being pursued by a pack of Velociraptors, come across a herd of various dinosaurs, led by another Iguanodon named Kron and his lieutenant Bruton. Other herd members include elderly Baylene the Brachiosaurus, Eema the Styracosaurus, the doglike Ankylosaurus Url, and Kron's younger sister, Neera.
Aladar and the lemurs accompany the herd across a desert to reach a nearby breeding ground the herd has visited before. However, they are being followed by the Velociraptors and later by a pair of Carnotaurus, referred to as "Carnotaurs" in the film. After a day and a night of marching, the herd stops at a lake that appears to be dried up, but the water is revealed to be underground, by Aladar hearing it underneath because he had been trying to get Baylene and Eema across. Later that day, Carnotaurs begin stalking the herd, sending the herd into a panicked flurry. Aladar, the lemurs, Eema, Baylene, Url, and Bruton are all left behind and regroup in a series of caves. The Carnotaurs attack them, but Bruton sacrifices himself to allow the others to flee, burying one of the Carnotaurs in the process. The group flee to the back of the caverns, then smash down a wall to reveal a path straight into the breeding ground. Eema spots that the usual entrance has been blocked off, prompting Aladar to find Kron and the rest of the herd.
Kron, Neera, and the herd are on the other side of the blocked-off entrance, Kron ordering that the herd climb impossibly over the wall. Aladar arrives and suggests the route through the caves due to a sheer drop on the other side that would kill the herd, which Kron objects to and accuses Aladar of stealing his role as leader. The two fight for dominance until Neera steps in and defends Aladar, deciding to go with him and the herd through his route. The surviving Carnotaur appears, causing the herd to go into a panic. Aladar convinces the herd that the only way they can survive is by standing together. They fend off the Carnotaur and get past it, but the Carnotaur then notices Kron, who had refused to follow Aladar, and decided he would climb the wall to get to the nesting grounds. The Carnotaur begins to chase Kron down. Neera notices this and rushes to try to aid her brother, soon followed by Aladar. In the fight that ensues, Kron is fatally wounded by the Carnotaur. Aladar forces the Carnotaur onto a cliff edge that collapses, sending it plummeting to its death. Neera comes to Kron, but it is too late. The herd reaches the breeding ground, led by Aladar. Aladar and Neera have children as well as the rest of the herd, and the lemurs find more of their kind.
==Cast==
*D.B. Sweeney as Aladar
*Alfre Woodard as Plio
*Ossie Davis as Yar
*Max Casella as Zini
*Hayden Panettiere as Suri
*Samuel E. Wright as Kron
*Julianna Margulies as Neera
*Peter Siragusa as Bruton
*Joan Plowright as Baylene
*Della Reese as Eema
===Additional voices===
*Matt Adler as Bruton's Scout
*Sandina Bailolape
*Edie Lehmann Boddicker
*Zachary Bostrom
*Catherine Cavadini as Female Lemurs
*Holly Dorff
*Greg Finley as Male Lemur
*Jeff Fischer
*Barbara Iley
*David Allen Kramer
*Susan Stevens Logan
*David McCharen
*Tracy Metro
*Daran Norris
*Bobbi Page
*Noreen Reardon
*Chelsea Russo
*Evan Sabara as Young Zini
*Aaron Spann
*Melanie Spore
*Andrea Taylor
*John Walcutt
*Camille Winbush
*Billy West
==Production==
While a dinosaur-related computer-animated film had been contemplated for over a decade, the film finally went into production when it did, as "the technology to produce the stunning visual effects" had come about - a few years before Dinosaur's eventual release in 2000. The CGI effects are coupled with "real-world backdrops to create a 'photo-realistic' look". The crew went all around the world in order to "record dramatic nature backgrounds" for the film, which were then "blended with the computer-animated dinosaurs". Disney said that the over-$100 million visual effects "make the film an 'instant classic'".
The concept for the film was originally conceived by Paul Verhoeven and Phil Tippett in 1988 and was pitched as a stop-motion animated film with the title Dinosaurs. The film's original main protagonist was a Styracosaurus and the main antagonist was originally a Tyrannosaurus Rex. The film was originally going to be much darker and violent in tone and would end with the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, which would ultimately result in the deaths of the film's characters. Paul Verhoeven and Phil Tippett pitched the idea to Disney, only to have the idea for the film shelved away with the onset of the Disney Renaissance until the mid-1990s. The film was originally supposed to have no dialogue at all, in part to differentiate the film from with which Dinosaur shares plot similarities. Michael Eisner insisted that the film have dialogue in order to make it more "commercially viable". A similar change was also made early in the production of The Land Before Time, which was originally intended to feature only the voice of a narrator.
The film's score was composed by James Newton Howard. Pop singer/songwriter Kate Bush reportedly wrote and recorded a song for the film but due to complications the track was ultimately not included on the soundtrack. According to HomeGround, a Kate Bush fanzine, it was scrapped when Disney asked Bush to rewrite the song and Bush refused; however, according to Disney, the song was cut from the film when preview audiences did not respond well to the track. In Asia, pop singer Jacky Cheung's song Something Only Love Can Do, with versions sung in English, Mandarin, Chinese, and Cantonese, was adopted as the theme song for the film.
The Countdown to Extinction attraction at the Disney's Animal Kingdom theme park, was renamed and re-themed to the movie. It is now known as Dinosaur but the storyline was always intended to tie in with the movie, considering the usage of a Carnotaurus as the ride's antagonist and Aladar as the Iguanodon that guests rescue from the meteor and take back into the present, seen wandering the Dino Institute in Security Camera footage seen on monitors in the attraction's unloading area.
George Scribner was the original director of the film. Scribner spent two years on it and left to join Walt Disney Imagineering. But fundamentally, the story was pretty much the same after he left.
Though Eric Leighton, one of the directors, spoke about his team "want[ing] to learn as much about dinosaurs as possible", he also admitted that they would "cheat like hell" because they were not creating a documentary. A Disney press kit revealed that the film "intentionally veers from scientific fact in certain aspects". In reality, the film cheated in multiple ways regarding how the "dinosaurs are depicted" and how they "are presented in an evolutionary context".
Dinosaur combines the use of live-action backgrounds with computer animation of prehistoric creatures, notably the titular dinosaurs, produced by Walt Disney Feature Animation's Computer Graphics Unit that was later merged with Dream Quest Images to create Disney's The Secret Lab department. The Secret Lab department closed in 2002.
Vision Crew Unlimited provided the live-action special visual effects.
==Reception==
===Critical response===
Dinosaur received generally favorable reviews from critics. The review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reported that 65% of critics gave the film positive reviews, based on 122 reviews (79 "Fresh" and 43 "Rotten"); with an average score of 6.2/10. The overall consensus on the site was: "While Dinosaur's plot is generic and dull, its stunning computer animation and detailed backgrounds are enough to make it worth a look." Roger Ebert gave the film three stars out of four praising the film's "amazing visuals" but criticizing the decision to make the animals talk, which he felt cancelled out the effort to make the film so realistic. "An enormous effort had been spent on making these dinosaurs seem real, and then an even greater effort was spent on undermining the illusion" was his final consensus. The overall rating of Dinosaur on Metacritic from critics is 56%, with 15 critics giving positive reviews, 12 giving mixed reviews, and 5 giving negative reviews.
The lemurs depicted in the movie strongly resemble the sub-species Verreaux's sifaka. Biologists have raised concerns that the movie is misleading and could potentially confuse people, as it suggests lemurs (in their present evolved state) co-existed with dinosaurs over 65 million years ago. All modern strepsirrhines including lemurs are traditionally thought to have evolved from 'primitive' primates known as adapiforms during the Eocene (56 to 34 mya) or Paleocene (65 to 56 mya).
In an analysis of the film, done as part of EmpireOnline's Your Guide To Disney's 50 Animated Features, on the opening sequence it said "much of the scenery is skillfully-composited live-action, including shots of the tepui mountains that would captivate Up's Carl Fredricksen". However, it spoke negatively about the unrealistic talking dinosaurs after the opening, describing it as a "nose-dive". It said they "sound[ed] more like mallrats than terrible lizards" and that although no-one knows what dinosaurs sound like, they definitely don't sound like that. It also disliked how the meteor hit Earth in Act 1, making the majority of the film set "in gray gravel-pits rather than the lush landscapes we were sold". It said "the animals [are] cute enough, but the script, characters and dino-action are all plodding kiddie fare", but added these faults are made up through "James Newton Howard's majestic score". It cited similarities to the 1988 dinosaur-themed Don Bluth film "The Land Before Time", and the more successful prehistoric Blue Sky Studios film Ice Age (which it described as "sassier"), and added that the "images of desperately migrating dinosaurs hark back to the far greater Fantasia". The film was also deemed "inferior" to the work of Pixar.
Phil Tippett who had pitched the idea was disappointed with the final product. And he called the movie "awful" in a interview with SYFY.
===Box office===
Dinosaur was a box-office success. It opened at #1 making $38,854,851 in its first weekend from 3,257 theaters, for an average of $11,929 per theater, beating DreamWorks' on its opening day, and the company's third best opening ever at the time, before it was overtaken by 's on its second weekend. It had a final gross of $137,748,063 domestically which covered its production costs. The film was eventually accepted overseas earning $212,074,702 for a worldwide take of $349,822,765, becoming the 5th highest-grossing movie of 2000. But although nowhere near a flop, the high production and marketing costs meant that the film did not come close to breaking even during its theatrical release. Further more, the BBC documentary miniseries Walking with Dinosaurs which used the same technique with using CGI dinosaurs in live-action backgrounds had aired in the US on the Discovery Channel a month before the film's release, which somewhat cause disinterest to the film.
==Release==
The film has been released onto VHS, DVD and Blu-ray.http://disneydvd.disney.go.com/dinosaur.html
==Other media==
Disney Interactive released a tie-in video game on the Dreamcast, PlayStation, PC, and Game Boy Color in 2000. To promote the release of Dinosaur, the Disney theme park ride "Countdown to Extinction" was renamed "DINOSAUR", and its plot, which had always prominently featured a Carnotaurus and an Iguanadon, was mildly altered so that the Iguanodon is specifically meant to be Aladar, the protagonist of the movie, and the plot of the ride is now about a human scientist traveling through time to a point just before the impact of the meteor which caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, to bring Aladar back to the present and save his life.
==Trivia==
*This is the fourth Walt Disney Animation Studios film not to have humans in it, following Bambi, Robin Hood, and the The Lion King. This is also the first PG-rated Disney animated film not to have humans in it.
*This was the first animated film to be released on Blu-ray, back in 2006 to be precise.
*This is also the first film since The Three Caballeros to be a whole original story.
*Disney originally was going to use the all-time famous Tyrannosaurus rex, but instead used the relatively unknown Carnotaurus.
*You can see one of the early storyboard sequences of the T-Rex original planned for DINOSAUR on the bonus video "Make your own Dinosaur: With Peter & Andrea Von Sholly" on the video zone section of Prehysteria! in 1993.
*One error in the film is the Pterosaur would be too tired to fly all the way from South America to Madagascar, or Lemur Island, because Madagascar was the habitat of lemurs. Another error is the meteor landed somewhere near the Gulf of Mexico, not near Madagascar, or Lemur Island. Also, Aladar swam to another island, which was probably one near Africa, but later in the movie, they end up in South America.
**According to the DVD special feature "Dinopedia" (not to be confused with National Geographic's Dino-Pedia), Iguanodons were found on every continent (except Antarctica).
**However, this is an inconsistency because Iguanodon remains are only known from Europe. But at the time the film was released, it was considered that they were known from Europe, Africa, Asia, and North America. However, Iguanodont remains are known from every continent so this is somewhat excusable to some degree.
*Dinosaur is Disney's first CGI movie to use real-life backgrounds.
*The Lion King 1½ Gameboy Advance sneak peek in the DVD release of The Lion King 1½ features the small chant "Ooa, ooa" from the "Aladar and Neera" track.
*Pam Marsden, one of the producers of the film, is also the producer for the Sony Animation film and .
*Dinosaur is the first Disney film musically composed by James Newton Howard, the second being Atlantis: The Lost Empire, the third being Treasure Planet, the fourth being Gnomeo & Juliet, the fifth being Maleficent, the sixth being Raya and the Last Dragon.
*Dinosaur is the 47th highest-grossing animated film, the 7th highest-grossing Walt Disney film (excluding Pixar), and the 42nd highest-grossing animated film in the "Computer" category.
**This film is also the seventh highest-grossing dinosaur movie behind Jurassic World, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, Jurassic Park, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, and Jurassic Park III.
*Baker Bloodworth was also the producer for The Origin of Stitch and Gnomeo & Juliet.
*Dinosaur is the third non-musical animated Disney Feature, following The Black Cauldron and The Rescuers Down Under.
*This film is responsible for bringing many species of dinosaur into the realm of popular culture; most notably species like Carnotaurus, Iguanodon, Pachyrhinosaurus, and Oviraptor. Though it should be noted that Iguanodon was present in pop culture for a longer time period, probably due to the fact that it was one of the first dinosaurs ever discovered.
**It should also be noted that several species of dinosaurs & prehistoric animals were cut from the final film. Examples include (a giant crocodile), (a medium sized crocodile), , , , (a relative of the famous ), , Allosaurus, , , , Stegosaurus, Triceratops, Tyrannosaurus, Maiasaura, Lambeosaurus, Compsognathus, , Corythosaurus, (a relative of the famous Stegosaurus), Spinosaurus, , , , , (a relative of the much more famous Pachycephalosaurus), and Ornithomimus.
*This movie is similar to , as both involve plant-eating dinosaurs living in a safe haven from predators (for Dinosaur, the Nesting Grounds; for The Land Before Time, the Great Valley).
*Dinosaur is not included in the Walt Disney Animated Classics line in the UK, being replaced with The Wild.
*Early articles stated that Kiefer Sutherland was a part of the voice cast. In 1997, it was reported that Kiefer was going to voice a character at the time but he had commitments.
*A short clip of this film where Baylene first passed by Aladar and the lemurs in the sandstorm is featured in two of the Disney Villains mixes included on the bonus features in the DVD release of Mickey's House of Villains.
*This is the second Walt Disney Animation Studios film to be rated PG by the MPAA after The Black Cauldron.
*At Busch Gardens Williamsburg on the railroad ride. The music that is played on it is actually "The Egg Travels/Epilogue" soundtrack.
==Gallery==
Hallet dinosaur painting.jpg|Early original concept art design for the film by Mark Hallett
T-rex hunting a frog concept by Pete Von Sholly.png
Disney Dinosaur concept by William Stout.jpg
Disney Dinosaur heads & necks concept by William Stout.jpg
Disney Dinosaur herds gathering together concept.png
Unused T-rex concept by Steve Wang.png
Early T-rex stop-motion puppet by Steve Wang.png|Early original plans as stop-motion animation
Pachycephalosaurus concept art.png|Pachycephalosaurus concept #1 for Dinosaur by Ricardo Delgado
Disney Dinosaur unused Pachycephalosaurus concept.png|Pachycephalosaurus concept #2 for Dinosaur by Ricardo Delgado
Disney Dinosaur herds gathering in circle concept.png
Disney Dinosaur 25 species chart concept.png
Disney Dinosaur Utahraptor concept art.jpg|Utahraptor
Raptor trio Disney Dinosaur concept art.png
Amargasaurus concept art.jpg.png|Amargasaurus
Disney Dinosaur Ornithomimus concept art.png|Ornithomimus
Maiasaura concept 1.jpg.png|Maiasaura
Maiasaura concept 2.jpg.png
Maiasaura concept 3.jpg.png
Disney Dinosaur characters play on beach concept.png
Disney Dinosaur Talarurus concept art.png|Talarurus
Ankylosaurus concept by Ricardo Delgado.jpg|Ankylosaurus
Oviraptor concept by Ricardo Delgado.jpg|Oviraptor
Carnotaur concept by William Stout.jpg|Carnotaurus
Disney Dinosaur Parasaurolophus concept art.jpg|Parasaurolophus
Styracosaurus Disney Dinosaur Concept.jpg|Styracosaurus
Pentaceratops concept.jpg|Pentaceratops
Disney Dinosaur Spinosaurus concept art.png|Spinosaurus
Velociraptor juvenile and adult concept art.png|Velociraptor
Abandoned River Crossing concept by Doug Henderson.jpg|Abandoned Scene
Dinosaur Herd.jpg
==References==
==External links==
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ar:ديناصور
ro:Dinozauri
da:Dinosaurerne
es:Dinosaurio
fr:Dinosaure
it:Dinosauri
ru:Динозавр
pl:Dinozaur
pt-br:Dinossauro
zh:恐龍
Category:Disney animated features canon
Category:2000 films
Category:Dinosaur
Category:Films about animals
Category:Animated films
Category:Live-action films
Category:PG-rated films
Category:Hybrid films