Disney Count Down #49: Dinosaur (2000)

So here’s a name that most people won’t recognize: Secret Lab.

For the average movie-goer, it’s a pretty well-known fact that Disney owns various different studios, even if they aren’t aware of that fact directly: Marvel, Lucasfilm, and Pixar are all studios that the company currently has jurisdiction over. But back in the late 90’s, there was another smaller studio that Disney created after merging Dream Quest Images (an American special effects company) and their animation’s computer graphics group called Secret Lab. Despite the enthusiasm that went along with the creation of this studio, Secret Lab was dismantled in 2002 and disappeared into the abyss of Disney’s history.

It’s this studio that happened to be responsible for creating #49 on this list—Dinosaur.

Dinosaur was to be an experiment of sorts with the new CGI technology that was developing. Disney played up the technological maturity of this film in their advertizing a lot, declaring that the over-$100 million visual effects “make the film an 'instant classic.’” And while I despise this mentality—the idea that a bad script and hackneyed story/characters doesn’t matter as long as you have awesome visuals—there is no denying that the combination of live-action cinematography and CGI dinosaurs wowed audiences and critics when the movie was released. Dinosaur was a mix between live-action footage and CGI characters, something that, up until that point in time, had never been tried on a large scale. And even today, most of the animation still holds up pretty well for something that was operating off of the baby forms of our current technology.

There was a ton of advertising that went into this movie, as Disney expected Dinosaur to be the biggest and greatest thing of 2000. The Countdown to Extinction attraction in Disney World’s Animal Kingdom was re-named and modified to cater to this film, referencing several characters and the storyline from the movie. They released the first several minutes of the film as its trailer (something they also did with The Lion King) which was received across the board with positivity and excitement from critics and fans.

Dinosaur was a big deal.

Originally, the dinosaurs were not intended to talk. The idea was to maintain as realistic a representation as possible (minus the fact that several of the dinos in this film wouldn’t have actually existed together in real life), but it was scrapped in order to make the film more marketable. A similar situation happened with The Land Before Time, a film that came out several years prior and did everything right that Dinosaur got wrong (which is a lot). The result is a strange mix between reality and cartoon that doesn’t bode well for the overall outcome of the movie.

The story goes like this: A young dinosaur named Aladar (D.B. Sweeney) is misplaced from his home while still in his egg and lands in the hands of a lemur family who raises him as their own. When a meteor shower strikes the island that they live on and throws the family into the midst of a herd on their way to their nesting grounds, Aladar makes friends with some of the older members of the group and learns that things are run by an angry, controlling dinosaur named Bruton (Peter Siragusa). Aladar runs into trouble with Bruton when he tries to get him to slow down so that the older dinosaurs can cross safely. When the herd is attacked by a vicious “carnitore,” and separates Aladar and his new friends/family from everyone else, it’s up to the young hero to get them to the nesting grounds on their own and save the herd as well.

When I re-watched this movie several months ago, my initial reaction was that the characters are good and that the story at least made sense. But now, I see that character and story are one of the intense pitfalls of Dinsoaur. It’s very—very—clear that the creative team behind this movie didn’t give a crap about making the story intriguing or the characters interesting. In fact, they have to be some of the worst things that Disney has ever spit out, and I’m including Aurora and the Prince from Cinderella in that mix. Aladar is the most clichéd hero that has ever been put to screen, and while he’s pleasant in the sense that there’s nothing you dislike about him, there’s nothing that captures your attention or imagination, either. The love interest is a generic, useless love interest and the villain is boring. The lemurs are a little more engaging, but the whole “love monkey” nonsense from the one lemur is enough to make me throw up my lunch. The story is predictable and because the characters don’t draw your attention, it makes the movie feel that much worse.

And to be honest, I’m really not that impressed with the dinosaur animation almost fifteen years later. The textures are great, but the way the characters move just looks awkward to me. I’m not that big of a dinosaur aficionado, and so watching a movie made up almost entirely of them is not an automatic win for me, but there’s something very theme park ride to me whenever they move. Maybe it’s the fact that they are working with gigantic animals that are not as familiar to us, but seeing what happened with the new Godzilla movie and how well that dinosaur was realized, it just falls flat in 2014. For all of that, though, the cinematography is fantastic. There are some really great aerial shots of dinosaurs flying across fields, bursting out of bushes, rock-a-lanches, and all kinds of other good stuff.

The film was, to its credit, successful at the box office. It opened at #1 and grossed approx. $350 million internationally, covering its production cost. Critics praised the visuals but condemned the lackluster story and characters. Nowadays, people seem to have a similar take on the film. While nothing about it sticks out as SUPER CRAZY TERRIBLE, there’s also nothing that is particularly spectacular. And that’s ultimately where Dinosaur falls flat: It’s just an hour and twenty minutes of mediocrity.

Fun Facts

The backgrounds in the movie are actually superimposed photos of exotic tropical locations such as Tahiti and Hawaii.

The job of composing the score was offered to Harry Gregson-Williams, but he turned it down Because of his work on Shrek.

One original concept for the dialogue in the film would have seen the characters not moving their lips and beaks to talk but rather as voice-overs, similar to Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey.

During production of the film's computer graphic effects, Baylene was referred to by the animators as "The Wall of Meat".

Among the sounds that Url the Ankylosaur makes at some points are chimpanzee vocalizations.