Disney’s Ambitious Attempt at Its First Ever CGI Movie Is Under-Loved and Under-Appreciated to This Day
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While working together on RoboCop in 1986, stop-motion director Phil Tippett approached Paul Verhoeven with an idea for a film about dinosaurs. Inspired by Bambi, the film was envisioned as a nature documentary told without any dialogue. The dinosaurs would be animated using Tippett’s go-motion technique and live, fight, and die as they would in the wild and end on the raw, destructive force of the K-Pg extinction event. They approached Disney with their concept and hired Walton Green as their writer. However, the project was wracked with delays and rewrites, especially when the studio demanded that the dinosaurs talk. The film then morphed into a more traditional narrative that had many biblical elements: the main character, his friend, and the antagonist were named Noah, Adam, and Caine, and Noah would use his gift of prophecy to try and save his herd from a coming disaster. Further rewrites saw the characters’ names changed to Aladar (D. B. Sweeney), Zini (Evan Sabara and Max Casella), and Krone (Samuel E. Wright) and the addition of many anachronistic jokes. Then, on May 19th, 2000, Dinosaur hit theaters.
25 years later, Dinosaur’s reputation hasn’t improved or diminished compared to when it was first released. The consensus is that, technically, the film is a marvel, but its story and characters leave much to be desired. Thus, it has fallen into obscurity among Disney fans, remembered only by fans of animation, dinosaurs, and Disney history, or those who remember seeing the trailer, which showed the first five minutes of the movie. However, those technical achievements are worth praising, both for what they did for the film and for Disney as a whole. Not only did it usher Disney animation into the 21st century, but it also helped to shape their business strategy as they navigated their post-Renaissance era.
‘Dinosaur’s Effects Were Ambitious and Groundbreaking
Dinosaur entered production during a pivotal time in the history of animation when CGI was becoming more commonplace in animated films, with Disney in particular constantly experimenting to see how they could combine this new technology with their hand-drawn elements. Then Toy Story came out and proved that animated movies could be made entirely with computers and be profitable. Thus, it’s no surprise that Disney decided to replace Tippett’s go-motion with CGI characters. Ironically, the same thing happened to Tippett during the production of Jurassic Park.
For the period, the CGI models were phenomenal and still hold up pretty well compared to other early 2000 films. The texture on the dinosaur’s skin is highly detailed, and everyone moves realistically, with muscles and fat shifting with every step. But the biggest success of the CGI came from the facial animations. Specialized programs were made to give the models a wide range of expressions, allowing the characters to emote on a level similar to real performers. This even extends to characters without lips, like the Styracosaurus Eema (Della Reese), or the non-speaking dinosaurs, who emote with their eyes and other subtle facial movements. They also used a “Fur Tool” program for the lemur’s fur, which allowed the animators to simulate hair movement by tweaking only a few keystone hairs. This would be a stepping stone for more impressive fur programs, such as those from Monsters, Inc., and The Incredibles.
‘Dinosaur’ Is More of a Live-Action Animated Film
Another way Dinosaur pushed the boundaries of its medium was in its backgrounds. While the characters are CGI, the environments they interact with are real and come from locations like California, Florida, Hawaii, Australia, Jordan, and Venezuela. That’s right, Dinosaur is more of a live-action animated film than 2019’s The Lion King, which only had one scene not made on a computer: the opening sunrise. To pull this off, the animators had to be in constant contact with two different on-site crews, who first scouted out locations and sent reference photos back to the animators. They then created 3D landscapes and crude animations to send back to the on-site crew so they would know where the characters were supposed to be in each shot. Their attention to detail was so great that most scenes in the movie are actually made up of shots from multiple different real-world locations.
To best simulate the feeling of a dinosaur’s perspective, the crew created what they called the Dino-cam, a successor to Walt Disney‘s multiplane camera that brought dynamic camera shots to 2D animation. The Dino-cam was suspended between two adjustable towers by a cable and could be rotated 360 degrees while moving up to 30 mph. This allowed for incredibly dynamic shots from the perspective of the tallest or smallest dinosaurs, even when they were running. This worked together with the landscapes and the character models to create one of the most immersive prehistoric worlds that, at times, feels like a snapshot of the ancient past. These techniques would help pave the way forward for future advancements in CG animation.
‘Dinosaur’ Greatly Contributed to Disney’s Future
Beyond its technical achievements, Dinosaur is also noteworthy because of when it came out; because while Disney was the dominant force in the 1990s, things were changing at the turn of the century. Broadway-style musical numbers had seen great success with films like The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast, but following Pocahontas, Disney’s later Renaissance films would never achieve the same commercial or critical success as their predecessors. This was partially because Disney’s success had spawned a plethora of copycats, so audiences were getting a little sick and tired of the formula. Meanwhile, Pixar’s success with Toy Story and DreamWorks coming to bat with Antz, a CGI film, and The Prince of Egypt, a 2D film, showed that Disney no longer had a guaranteed monopoly on animated blockbusters. They decided to combat this by going ahead with more experimental projects and changing films currently in production, like The Emperor’s New Groove, which underwent a complete overhaul to change it from an animated musical to a road trip comedy.
Dinosaur has the honor of being both Disney’s first CGI animated film and its first animated film to be based on an original idea and not feature existing characters—however, its future was uncertain. With a budget of $127.5 million, it was the most expensive CGI film at the time, so there was a strong chance that it would be a flop. Yet, despite the film’s lukewarm critical reception, it was a financial success, earning $349.8 million. In honor of the film, Disney altered their Countdown to Extinction ride from the Disney Animal Kingdom, naming it Dinosaur and making Aladar the Iguanodon guests are sent back in time to retrieve.
Unfortunately, similar success couldn’t be found in Disney’s subsequent 2D films—The Emperor’s New Groove underperformed, while the back-to-back sci-fi adventure films Atlantis: The Lost Empire and Treasure Planet bombed hard. Even their most successful 2D film of this era, Lilo & Stitch, only grossed $273.1 million. Meanwhile, Pixar and DreamWorks were continuing to earn big money and critical praise with their CGI films, and new companies like Blue Sky Studios were also making waves. Disney could see the writing on the wall, and after the disappointing release of 2004’s Home on the Range, 2D animation was put on hold. 2005 saw the release of Chicken Little, Disney’s first entirely CGI film, which earned more money than Lilo & Stitch. Disney tried to revive 2D animation with The Princess and the Frog, but CGI films continued to outperform, and they haven’t released another 2D since 2011’s Winnie the Pooh.
So, what can be said about the legacy of Dinosaur? Simply put, it is a testament to how even the most forgotten of films can have an impact on the entertainment landscape. Yes, its story is derivative of The Land Before Time, and it’s peppered with such riveting dialogue as “your bouffée table of love,” but its ambition and experimental use of CGI helped to further the technology. Its financial success also helped to contribute to Disney’s shift away from 2D animation, which had sadly been on the decline since Toy Story. Is it Disney’s most important movie? No, not by a long shot. But it is a fascinating look back at the experimental era of the 2000s and a time when Disney was willing to take more risks. Nowadays, they play it safe with sequels, remakes, and new additions to popular franchises like Star Wars and Marvel, which rely heavily on nostalgia and brand loyalty. Meanwhile, the first five minutes of Dinosaur are told without any dialogue, immersing the audience in the prehistoric world thanks to phenomenal visuals of nature that come close to Tippett and Verhoeven’s original concept and James Newton Howard‘s legendary music. Perhaps Disney can look to the past for inspiration on how to tell future stories, and they can return to the pioneers of high-quality animated storytelling we used to love.
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