Dinosaur is a 2000 American live-action/animated adventure film produced by Walt Disney Feature Animation in association with The Secret Lab, and released by Walt Disney Pictures. The film was directed by Ralph Zondag and Eric Leighton (in his feature directorial debut) and produced by Pam Marsden, from a screenplay written by John Harrison, Robert Nelson Jacobs, and Walon Green, and a story by the trio alongside Zondag and Thom Enriquez. It features the voices of D. B. Sweeney, Alfre Woodard, Ossie Davis, Max Casella, Hayden Panettiere, Samuel E. Wright, Julianna Margulies, Peter Siragusa, Joan Plowright, and Della Reese. The story follows a young Iguanodon who was adopted and raised by a family of lemurs on a tropical island. After surviving a devastating meteor shower, the family moves out for their new home and befriends a herd of dinosaurs along the way while on a journey to the "Nesting Grounds". However, they face harsh circumstances with its Darwinistic leader while being hunted down by numerous predators, such as Carnotaurus.
The initial idea was conceived in 1986 by Phil Tippett and Paul Verhoeven, which they conceived as a darker, naturalistic film about dinosaurs. The project underwent numerous iterations with multiple directors attached. In 1994, Walt Disney Feature Animation began development on the project and spent several years developing the software to create the dinosaurs. The characters in Dinosaur are computer-generated. However, most of the backgrounds are live-action and were filmed on location. A number of backgrounds were found in various continents such as the Americas and Asia; various tepuis and Angel Falls also appear in the film. With a budget of $127.5 million, Dinosaur was reportedly the most expensive computer-animated film at the time.[2][3] Dinosaur is also the first film from Walt Disney Feature Animation to be 3D animated.
Dinosaur was released on May 19, 2000, to generally positive reviews from critics, who praised the film's opening sequence, soundtrack and animation, but criticized the story for its lack of originality.[4] The film grossed $349 million worldwide, becoming the fifth highest-grossing film of 2000.[1] It became the fourth best-selling home video release of 2001, selling 10.6 million copies and garnering $198 million in sales.[5]
A Carnotaurus hunts a herd of dinosaurs, destroys an Iguanodon nest, and kills a Pachyrhinosaurus. The lone surviving Iguanodon egg is stolen by an Oviraptor, and, after a series of mishaps, arrives at an island inhabited by prehistoric lemurs. Plio, the daughter of lemur patriarch Yar, names the newly-hatched baby Aladar and raises him alongside her daughter Suri, despite Yar's initial objections.
Several years later, a fully grown Aladar watches the lemurs take part in a mating ritual, in which Plio's awkward teenage brother Zini fails to find a female. Moments after the ritual ends, they are interrupted by a meteor crashing into the Earth, creating an explosive shockwave that destroys the island. Aladar and Yar's family flee across the sea to the mainland. Being the only survivors, they mourn their losses, before journeying inland.
While crossing the burnt desert left by the meteor, the group is attacked by a pack of Velociraptors. They escape by joining a multi-species herd of dinosaur refugees heading for the communal Nesting Grounds. Falling afoul of callous Iguanodon herd leader Kron, they retreat to the end of the line, and befriend the old Styracosaurus Eema, her pet Euoplocephalus Url, and her equally elderly friend Baylene, a Brachiosaurus. The herd travels for days without water to the site of a lake, only to find it seemingly dried up. Kron orders the herd to move on and let the weakest perish, but Aladar stays behind with a struggling Eema. He and Baylene dig until they reach the water table. The rest of the herd follows suit, and Kron's sister Neera, impressed by Aladar's compassion, begins to grow closer to him. However, Kron sees Aladar's increasing popularity as a threat.
Meanwhile, two Carnotaurus have been tracking the herd, and ambush a scouting party led by Kron's lieutenant Bruton. Surviving the attack, a badly wounded Bruton warns of the approaching predators. Ushering the herd away from the lake, Kron deliberately leaves Aladar, the lemurs, the elderly dinosaurs, and the injured Bruton behind, hoping that they will slow their pursuers down. The abandoned group takes shelter in a cave when a rainstorm begins, but the Carnotaurus find them during the night and attack. Fending off the attacking predators, Bruton sacrifices himself to cause a cave-in that kills one of the Carnotaurus, forcing the survivor to retreat.
The group ventures deeper into the cave, but they reach a dead end, causing Aladar to briefly lose hope. Baylene reproaches him for giving up, and uses her strength to smash through the wall, revealing the intact Nesting Grounds on the other side. While the group briefly celebrates, Eema notices that a landslide has collapsed the usual entrance into the valley. Aladar rushes off to warn Kron, who is attempting to force the herd to climb the rubble, unaware of the sheer drop on the other side. Kron sees the warning as a challenge for the position of herd leader and attacks Aladar, until Neera joins the fight on Aladar's behalf. She and the herd leave with Aladar, but Kron does not follow.
The surviving Carnotaurus arrives on the scene; Aladar rallies the herd to stand together against it, forcing the outnumbered Carnotaurus to back off. The predator then notices Kron trying to climb the rocks alone, and attacks him instead. Aladar and Neera rush to Kron's aid, but fail to arrive in time to save him. Aladar manages to push the Carnotaurus towards the edge of the drop, where the ground gives way, causing the Carnotaurus to fall to its death. Aladar and Neera mourn Kron, then lead the herd to the Nesting Grounds. Some time later, a new generation of dinosaurs hatches - among them Aladar and Neera's children - and the lemurs find more of their own kind.
"The reason why I wanted to do it was because it had this cosmic vision about evolution. That sounds a bit over the top but it would have been really good...There was a gigantic battle at the end as a comet moves closer and closer to Earth. The fight was between the sympathetic Styracosaurus and the antagonist Tyrannosaurus rex, and although the good guy wins, there's nothing to win any more because the comet hits Earth, and all the dinosaurs die. The lemurs survive because they are small enough to hibernate. The end of the film was the beginning of the human race."
After founding his own namesake studio, special effects artist Phil Tippett directed Prehistoric Beast (1984), an experimental animated short film in which a Centrosaurus is stalked by a Tyrannosaurus. Tippett's skill at creating go motion animated creatures led to the 1985 CBS animated documentary Dinosaur!.[8] A year later, Tippett was hired to work on the special effects team for RoboCop (1987). During filming, in December 1986, Tippett recalled, "When Jon Davison and I were shooting the live-action plates where ED-209 falls down the stairs, there was some kind of delay. Peter Weller's shoes didn't fit. so we had to wait for someone to get the right stunt shoes." Frustrated by the delay, Tippett suggested to Paul Verhoeven that they should produce a "dinosaur picture". That way, according to Tippett, "[w]e wouldn't have to be held up by actors in robot outfits."[7][9]
Verhoeven was excited at the idea and suggested an approach inspired by Shane (1953) in which "you follow a lead character through a number of situations and moving from a devastated landscape into a promised land."[7] Veteran screenwriter Walon Green was then brought on to write the script. Verhoeven and Tippett had planned to use stop motion animation techniques such as puppets, scale models, and miniatures.[10]
The film was originally going to be much darker and violent in tone, in a style akin to a nature documentary. The film's original main protagonist was a Styracosaurus named Woot and the main antagonist was a Tyrannosaurus rex named Grozni, with a small mammal named Suri as a supporting character. After Woot defeats Grozni in a final fight, the film would end with the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, which would ultimately result in the death of the dinosaurs.[7] Verhoeven then storyboarded two key sequences and calculated the project's preliminary budget to be $45 million. Verhoeven pitched the project to then-Disney chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg, who gave a counteroffer of $25 million because in Verhoeven's words, Katzenberg felt there wasn't "enough of an audience to justify that cost." The budget disputes led to Verhoeven and Tippett's departure from the project.[7]
In 1990, before Verhoeven and Tippett had departed the project, producer/director Thomas G. Smith became involved in the film, but briefly became the director after they had left. Reflecting on his tenure, Smith said, "Jeanne Rosenberg was still writing the script, but it was in trouble. Disney wanted a cute story of dinosaurs talking, and I didn't like the idea. I thought it should be more like Jean Annaud's The Bear. I wanted to have actual lemurs in it. They actually existed at the time of dinosaurs...We actually located a guy who trains them." However, Katzenberg called Smith to help on Honey, I Blew Up the Kid (1992) in which he was replaced by David W. Allen, who had just finished directing Puppet Master II (1990).[7] Multiple months were spent filming actual lemurs to portray Suri and creating visual development, but Allen's version also fell into development hell. Smith stated, "The thing that ultimately killed it is that Disney knew that Jurassic Park was coming along pretty well, and they knew it was being done digitally. They figured, 'Well, maybe, we should wait until we can do it digitally.'"[7]
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