Dinosaur (2000)

Our final dinosaur movie of the weekend is the movie appropriately titled Dinosaur.

The Movie:

Dinosaur is the 39th movie in the Disney Animated Canon, though notably it is left of the list in Europe in favor of The Wild, a film not made by, though produced and distributed by, Disney. (The Wild is the first and only film from C.O.R.E., a now defunct CGI special effects company.) Dinosaur had originally been in development before The Little Mermaid, but the success of that movie placed Dinosaur on the back burner. The film was originally intended to use stop motion, but after Disney had some success with 3-D CGI animation during the development of Fantasia 2000, they decided to go that route. The movie ended up combining CGI characters and effects with filmed backgrounds of actually scenery, mostly shot in South America. Dinosaur was the most expensive movie of the year 2000 and also the fifth most profitable. It received generally favorable if not exactly glowing reviews, thanks in large part to its visual effects, but it is largely forgotten today and comes at the start of Disney's post-Renaissance dark age.

Dinosaur begins with a single egg surviving an attack from a Carnotaurus. Through a series of events, that egg is carried to an off-shore island that is home to a group of lemurs, where it hatches an Iguanadon. The lemurs adopt the dinosaur, and he is named Aladar. Several years later, the now grown Aladar and the lemurs experience a meteor strike, and the resulting shockwave destroys the island. Aladar and the four surviving lemurs make it to the mainland, where they join a herd of other dinosaurs trying to reach their nesting ground while avoid predators and the increasingly harsh weather conditions.

I remember seeing both the original trailer for Dinosaur and the movie in the theaters. The trailer, like what was done with The Lion King, was essentially the opening of the film. The only problem is that this section of the film contains no dialogue. Had the whole movie been done like this, it would have been different from other dinosaur movies that had come before. However, this was not the case, as the movie did include dialogue from the main dinosaurs (except the carnivores) and the lemurs. Notably the original intent was to have no dialogue and instead use just a narrator, but this was changed at the insistence of Michael Eisner to make the film more commercially viable. (Ironically, the creators of Dinosaur wanted no dialogue because it would help to set the movie apart from The Land Before Time, which has a similar plot. The Land Before Time originally was also meant to have just a narrator before that movie was changed.)

As it stands, while the visuals were stunning for the time and did a wonderful job combining the CGI characters into the live backgrounds, today a lot of the CGI looks rather dated, especially at the beginning. However, as the story progresses, the CGI becomes less of a problem as you get engaged in the story. The story itself is ok but nothing remarkable, and the overall effect is a nice if fairly standard movie.

Dinosaur contains no songs, although one was originally written and scrapped, and some foreign markets included one on the soundtrack. The score is by the woefully under-recognized James Newton Howard, and here he does a nice job, with some tracks sweepingly epic with a large orchestral sound, and others incorporating percussion and vocal chanting similar to something out of The Lion King.

Presence in the Parks:

Dinosaur's presence in the parks is somewhat unusual compared with most movie tie-ins. Dinosaur shares its theming with the same named ride that anchors the Dinoland, USA section of Animal Kingdom in WDW. However, the ride is not based on the movie and the movie is not based on the ride, but rather, they were developed simultaneously.

You can find a more detailed write-up in other places on the internet, but basically, when Animal Kingdom was being developed, Disney faced a budget crunch, and the potential lands of Dinoland, USA and Beastly Kingdomme were placed on the chopping block, with one to be shelved for a phase two. As you can guess, the later lost (and many of the designers on that land left Disney and helped to develop The Lost Continent at Islands of Adventure up the road). Part of what made Dinoland more appealing, besides the general popularity of dinosaurs, was that Disney knew the movie Dinosaur was in development. So they took elements of two different proposed rides and combined them with the newly developed Enchanced Motion Vehicle technology that was first used in Disneyland's Indiana Jones ride to make a ride called Countdown to Extinction.

Countdown to Extinction opened with Animal Kingdom in 1998. The show building, called the Dinosaur Institute, had a statue of a Styracosaurus out front (the original main character of Dinosaur was to be such a dinosaur). The plot of the attraction had the riders sent back in time to rescue an Iguanadon from the moment just prior to the strike of the asteroid that caused the K-T extinction event. Along the way, the riders would be pursued by a Carnotaurus. In some ways, this more directly related to an earlier draft of the movie, which ended with the K-T extinction and all the dinosaurs dying.

Countdown to Extinction, Animal Kingdom, April 1999

In 2000, to coincide with the release of Dinosaur, the ride was renamed. A statue of Aladar was placed in front of the museum, and the dinosaur the rider was tracking was implied to be Aladar. However, this would mean that the Carnotaurus in the ride was not the same one as in the movie. In order to make the ride a little less frightening (after all, it was now tying more directly to a Disney movie), the ride was made less bumpy to have a lower height restriction, and dialogue and effects were changed. Noticeably, the blinding flash at the end of the ride to signify the meteor strike was replaced with one final attack by the Carnotaurus as the ride vehicle dives under (similar to the last drop of Universal's Jurassic Park ride but without water).