Dinosaur

A movie by Eric Leighton & Ralph Zondag

Monika says:

The story of iguanodon Aladar begins with an egg that somehow lands in the hands of a family of lemurs. The oversized orphan has a happy childhood on the island of the lemurs until the impact of a meteorite forces the entire family to leave their home. Looking for a new one they meet a herd of dinosaurs on their way to their nesting ground. Aladar and his little friends join them.

This Disney movie is not just a regular animated movie, but was digitally created. In 1999 we were able to admire real-looking prehistoric animals in the British TV documentary Walking with Dinosaurs. But just this authenticity is one of the weaknesses of DINOSAUR. The animals look so "real" that it comes as a shock when they start talking. The plot is as simple as the one from THE LAND BEFORE TIME and doesn’t do justice to the amazing pictures on the screen. And only the "Good Guys", i. e. the harmless herbivores, can talk. Their carnivorous pals who think of nothing but eating our newly found friends are only able to roar or growl. As the movie explains: they have a mouth full of teeth and are always in a bad mood.

The reconstructions of the dinosaurs reflect the latest findings of science, however, the makers of the movie happily mixed species living on different continents or even in different geological eras. All the dinosaurs are popular and likely to be recognized by the audience which was the purpose of the mix but looks strange to everybody with a real interest in the subject. Aladar’s herd consists mainly of iguanodons, hadrosaurs and styracosaurs, all from the Cretaceous but living several million years apart and therefore unlikely to get together. They meet evil little velociraptors on their way to the nesting grounds who lived in the late Cretaceous not in Northern America but in Mongolia. The ill-tempered carnotauri who chase the herd had their home actually on the South American continent. Worth mentioning are also the two saucy oviraptors who are eager to steal the other dinosaurs’ eggs – as their name suggests. Of course by now we know that their name isn’t accurate, but news of their rehabilitation perhaps hadn’t reached the studios when the movie went in production. Not that I would have expected a Disney movie to be accurate as far as such minor details are concerned. Still, what would you say about a movie set in today’s Africa that features woolly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers? Those two species have become extinct only a few thousand years ago, whereas the dinosaurs featured in the movie were separated by several ten million years. If you don’t mind such inaccuracies, though, and enjoy talking dinosaurs, you will be well entertained. From a technical point of view the movie is excellent.

Any comments? Write us:

Monika Hübner

Last changes: 01/04/03