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.

Disney Countdown #51: Home on the Range (2004)

And we are kicking off this lovely little list with possibly one of my most hated Disney films if you exclude the abominations that were 99% of the Direct-to-DVD sequels.

First, a bit of history.

Home on the Range initially began as a project entitled Sweating Bullets, a film that was to be directed by Mike Gabriel and Mike Giaimo and set as a Western-style re-telling of the Pied Piper legend.  But after five long years of work on the project with very little decent material to show for it, the two directors were yanked by Disney execs and replaced with Will Finn and John Sanford. They took what material Gabriel and Giaimo had and promptly scrapped most of it, aiming instead for a more comical and light-hearted approach to the story. Originally the plot had consisted of a young bull trying to save his herd from a rustler; in Sanford and Finn’s hands, it turned into a comedy about three cows that chase after a rustler for the reward money in order to save their failing farm. This film was re-named Home on the Range, and after it became clear that all of the re-writing and deconstructing would prevent the film from making its original 2003 release date, it was swapped with Brother Bear and scheduled to come out 2 April, 2004.

This also happened to be the point in Disney history where long-time fans and devoted followers were suppressing their tears and trying to hold out hope for the future: after the relative failure of their 2-D animated films over the past several years, which seemed to only be getting worse since the end of the 90’s Renaissance, as well as the rise of CGI animation that started with Toy Story and led to things like Shrek being the movie to imitate, Disney announced that they would be closing the doors to their 2-D studios and instead focusing on CG films. And while I will argue until the day I die that this fall-out had much less to do with 2-D animation and more with the poorly-executed ideas for movies that were often boring at best and down-right terrible at worst, what’s done is done.

In light of this reality, Home on the Range was to be the last 2-D animated feature that the company would produce. It wasn’t until John Lasseter—who was appointed chief creative officer by CEO Bob Iger after Disney purchased Pixar out-right—took the helm and decided, in 2006, that Disney was not out of the 2-D race, and would be releasing a new film in 2009 that would go back to Disney’s fairytale roots. But we’ll get to that one later.

The unfortunate result of Disney closing up its 2-D studio doors was that this film absolutely reeked of indifference. In many ways, Home on the Range was just one last project that needed to be completed before they locked everything up and stuck a For Sale sign on the door. The release date itself, a spring one that fell in the midst of the semester for school systems across the country, was telling in and of itself. The last time a full-blown animated feature that had been released outside of the summer months or the Thanksgiving/Christmas holiday season was The Jungle Book in the fall of 1967 (The Many Adventures ofWinnie the Pooh was released in the spring of 1977, but even that was technically a package film consisting of three shorts that had been laying around the studio collecting dust for the past 10+ years). Audiences and critics received this film with the same level of indifference that the studio seemed to exude, and the film garnered only $103 million internationally—not even covering its reported $110 million budget. Less than half of that money came from the United States. Home on the Range became the final nail in the coffin of 2-D animation without even really trying.

I actually remember seeing this film in theatres, albeit vaguely. I was ten or eleven at the time that this came out, either ending my elementary school days or finishing the first round of torture that makes up middle school. I was the target audience for this movie. Even I, as someone who has an unabashed loved for puns and the occasional fart joke, found this film to be more or less forgettable. Nothing about this movie appealed to me, and maybe a lot of my disdain lies in personal preference rather than objective criticism. I’m not a Western fan by any stretch of the imagination, and even the bright colors and interesting backgrounds did very little to pique my interest even re-watching it ten years later.

The storyline itself isn’t that bad, at least on paper, and the creative team behind this movie get points for coming up with something that is so outrageous that it at least catches your attention. A cow named Maggie (Roseanne Barr—I refuse to make a joke about this) and her owner are forced to auction off their cattle ranch after it was robbed and left them with nothing. She is given to another farm, called A Little Piece of Heaven, which also happens to be in debt, owing the bank $750. So Maggie encourages the other two cows from Piece of Heaven, Grace (Judy Dench) and Mrs. Caloway (Jennifer Tilly), to go into town and conjure up some money by winning awards at the county fair. When they get there, however, the sheriff’s horse Buck (Cuba Gooding Jr.) tells them that they can’t be given any more time and have three days to get the money or the farm will be auctioned off. They then hear about a wanted criminal, Alameda Slim, whose capture comes with a reward of the most convenient $750. Maggie convinces Grace and Mrs. O to go out and try to capture the criminal, all the while in competition with a less-than-friendly “hero” Rico (Charles Dennis) who wants to snag him and get the reward money for himself.

My biggest problem with this movie is the very obvious lack of trying from almost every angle. That’s not to say this is a poorly drawn or animated movie, or that the voice actors don’t get the job done, but there’s just so much about this that feels like I’m watching nothing more than a high-quality Saturday morning cartoon. The characters are so unbelievably stock and uninteresting, the plot is outrageous but ultimately predictable (without any of the fun), and perhaps the worst sin that this movie commits is that it is clearly meant for children. And that’s where this gets under my skin more than anything else. While there have been flops in the past that express the same kind of laziness in storytelling, on the whole Disney is famous for producing movies that not only kids can enjoy, but also their parents that take them to see it. This has been augmented by their conglomeration with Pixar—who have mastered that art even further—so when you look at this film and realize that this was what was meant to end the 70+ year legacy of 2-D animation, wouldn’t you die a little inside?

When Walt first started the company way back yonder (pun intended), his first and foremost interest, after making good films that he himself would want to see, was to show the world that animation was more than just a kiddy thing—it was an art form. And so his first five movies were all painstakingly crafted to be just that (much to the chagrin of some of his animators who thought going out of the way to make things as realistic as possible was pointless).To me, this doesn’t cut it. When you have lines like this in your movie… 

Grace: You’ll have to excuse her, she’s just a little tense. 

Maggie: Tense. What’s her specialty, sour cream? 

…there’s a serious problem.

And speaking of puns, this movie is loaded with them. Now, I am one of those weirdos who actually think puns are hilarious given the right context. But this movie boasts some of the most unfunny, painful, and down-right asinine puns I have ever had the misfortune of hearing. Initially, there was maybe one or two that got a chuckle out of me, but as the film played out and they kept coming as a poor substitute for creative dialogue and clever humor, I began to feel parts of my soul cracking and falling off into the abyss of despair.

So are there any redeemable qualities to this movie? Well sure, I suppose. The animation DOES look polished, though the angular and flat style isn’t exactly my cup of tea, I do like the character designs of Mrs. O and Grace; their expressions and physical humor are one of the few things I didn’t cringe at when watching this. Alan Menken’s—you know, half of the dynamic duo that wrote music for most of Disney’s masterpieces in the Renaissance alongside Howard Ashman—music here is okay, if still a bit on the bland and childish side. I like the bright color pallet, especially how Jennifer Tilly’s cow pops against most of the purplish backgrounds. I think it says a bit about her character, and that was clever.

There’s also a scene here in which the rustler uses his yodeling skills to herd cattle (which is how he’s been doing it before the plot of the movie begins) and the ensuing scene of unabashed color and playfulness that has a fairly obvious throwback to “Pink Elephants on Parade” from Dumbo would have been interesting to me if I didn’t find the context of what was happening to be outright ludicrous. But the obnoxious color and synchronized movement of the cows is amusing, at least in the sense that you know the animators were having some fun crafting the scene.

At the end of the day, I can say with confidence that I will not be showing my future children this movie, and I am so very glad that Lasseter took the reins and decided to give 2-D animation another shot at success—because this sure as heck isn’t.

Fun Facts  

The final feature film to use Disney's CAPS (Computer Animation Production System) pipeline. The system - more than a simple software application, it encompassed a complex UNIX-based network of workstations and servers handling the creation, editing, storage, and workflow of multiple animated sequences - was dismantled when the animation unit was shuttered.

Alameda Slim is named after Wilf Carter also known as "Montana Slim". Carter was known as a Country Singer and Yodeler.

The second Disney film to star both Jennifer Tilly and Steve Buscemi, the other film being Pixar's Monsters, Inc. (2001).

Mexican singer/songwriter Ely Guerra was the voice of Grace in the dubbed Mexican version.