Dinosaur (2000 film)

Dinosaur is a 2000 American live-action/computer-animated adventure drama film produced by Walt Disney Feature Animation in collaboration with Industrial Light & Magic and The Secret Lab. It was produced and directed by Steven Spielberg (in his animated directorial debut), written by Michael Crichton, Thom Enriquez, John Harrison and Robert Nelson Jacobs, and co-produced by Kathleen Kennedy, Roger Birnbaum and Pam Marsden. The film was released by Walt Disney Pictures from a co-production of Amblin Entertainment and Spyglass Entertainment on May 19, 2000 and is the 39th film and the first computer-animated film in the Disney Animated Canon. At officially $127.5 million, it was the most expensive theatrical movie release of the year. It stars D. B. Sweeney, Alfre Woodard, Ossie Davis, Max Casella, Hayden Panettiere, Julianna Margulies, Samuel E. Wright, Peter Siragusa, with Della Reese, and Joan Plowright.

The film takes place 65 million years ago in the Cretaceous period where the dinosaurs live in peace and harmony until one fateful day, a Carnotaurus attacks the herd as the egg travels to the island of lemurs where they adopt a baby Iguanodon and named it Aladar. One fateful night, an asteroid destroys the island where he, Plio, Yar, Zini and Suri embark on a journey to their new home called the nesting grounds with the help of Kron, Bruton, Neera and the rest of the herd in order to survive the journey.

While the main characters in Dinosaur are computer-animated, most of the film's backgrounds were filmed on location. Several backgrounds were found in Canaima National Park in Venezuela; various tepuis and Angel Falls also appear in the film.

The film received generally positive reviews from critics, who generally praised its visual effects, animation, Spielberg's direction, action sequences, screenplay, musical score, voice acting and a homage to Universal's Spielberg-helmed Jurassic Park franchise. Surprisingly, it became a box-office success, grossing $349.8 million over a $127.5 million budget.

Plot
The film opens with a female Iguanodon keeping a close watch on her eggs. A young Parasaurolophus accidentally wakes up a Carnotaurus who started chasing after the herd, and eventually kills a Pachyrhinosaurus. Then an Oviraptor takes the surviving egg then it was taken by a Pteranodon. The Pteranodon drops the egg by accident onto an Island called Lemur Island. Three Lemurs: Plio, Yar, and Zini found the egg when it hatched and then named the baby Iguanodon Aladar.

Years on, Plio has had a daughter named Suri and the family takes part in mating season which Zini fails to accomplish and goes without a mate. Moments after the mating season ends, a huge asteroid destroys the island and leaves only Aladar and his closest family members confirmed to be alive. The family move on and after being pursued by a pack of Velociraptors, come across a herd of various dinosaurs, led by another Iguanodon named Kron and his lieutenant Bruton. Other herd members include elderly Baylene the Brachiosaurus, Eema the Styracosaurus, the doglike Ankylosaurus Url, the friendly Tyrannosaurus Tex and Kron's younger sister Neera.

Aladar and the lemurs accompany the herd across a desert to reach a nearby breeding ground the herd has visited before. However, they are being followed by the Velociraptors and later by a pair of Carnotaurus, referred to as "Carnotaurs" in the film. After a day and a night of marching, the herd stops at a lake that appears to be dried up, but the water is revealed to be underground, by Aladar hearing it underneath because he had been trying to get Baylene and Eema across. Later that day, Carnotaurs begin stalking the herd, sending the herd into a panicked flurry. Aladar, the lemurs, Eema, Baylene, Url and Bruton are all left behind and regroup in a series of caves. The Carnotaurs attack them, but Bruton sacrifices himself to allow the others to flee, burying one of the Carnotaurs in the process. The group flee to the back of the caverns, then smash down a wall to reveal a path straight into the breeding ground. Eema spots that the usual entrance has been blocked off, prompting Aladar to find Kron and the rest of the herd.

Kron, Neera, and the herd are on the other side of the blocked-off entrance, Kron ordering that the herd climb impossibly over the wall. Aladar arrives and suggests the route through the caves due to a sheer drop on the other side that would kill the herd, which Kron objects to and accuses Aladar of stealing his role as leader. The two fight for dominance until Neera steps in and defends Aladar, deciding to go with him and the herd through his route. The surviving Carnotaur appears, causing the herd to go into a panic. Aladar convinces the herd that the only way they can survive is by standing together. They fend off the Carnotaur and get past it, but the Carnotaur then notices Kron, who had refused to follow Aladar, and decided he would climb the wall to get to the nesting grounds. The Carnotaur begins to chase Kron down. Neera notices this and rushes to try to aid her brother, soon followed by Aladar. In the fight that ensues, Kron is fatally wounded by the Carnotaur. Aladar and Tex force the Carnotaur onto a cliff edge that collapses, sending it plummeting to its death. Neera comes to Kron, but it is too late. The herd reaches the breeding ground, led by Aladar. Aladar and Neera have children as well as the rest of the herd, and the lemurs find more of their kind.

Cast

 * D.B. Sweeney as Aladar, a brave and compassionate Iguanodon who's been adopted into a family of lemurs and does what he can to make sure that the old and weak aren't left behind during the herd's migration. He serves as the main protagonist of the film.
 * Alfre Woodard as Plio, a lemur (Coquerel's Sifaka) matriarch who cares for her family.
 * Ossie Davis as Yar, a lemur patriarch whose occasional gruff demeanor is just a front covering his more compassionate interior. He is the father of Plio and Zini and the grandfather of Suri.
 * Max Casella as Zini, Aladar's stepuncle and wisecracking sidekick, Yar's son, Suri's uncle and Plio's brother.
 * Hayden Panettiere as Suri, Aladar's stepsister, Zini's little niece, Plio's daughter and Yar's granddaughter.
 * Samuel E. Wright as Kron, an Iguanodon leading a herd of dinosaur survivors who is characterized by a strict adherence to social Darwinist theory. He believes in survival of the fittest, which repeatedly clashes with Aladar's merciful manner. Apart from the Carnotaurs, Kron is the secondary antagonist of the film.
 * Julianna Margulies as Neera, Kron's sister, who ends up falling in love with Aladar because of his compassionate ways.
 * Peter Siragusa as Bruton, Kron's domineering right-hand assistant. He is betrayed and left for dead by Kron, and ultimately gives his life to kill one of the Carnotaurs to save Aladar, the lemurs, and the weak dinosaurs.
 * Joan Plowright as Baylene, an elderly and dainty Brachiosaurus (technically a Giraffatitan due to her identification as B. brancai).
 * Della Reese as Eema, a wizened, elderly and slow-moving Styracosaurus, and Url's companion.

Throughout the film, Velociraptors, Tyrannosaurus and Carnotaurus make appearances, but are not given voices. Early on, a Carnotaur attack precipitates the events that lead to Aladar's adoption by Plio and the lemurs. Later on, a group of Velociraptors chase Aladar down and later stalk the herd until they are scared away by a pair of Carnotaurs, who consistently stalk the herd in their search for food. The first Carnotaur was killed by Bruton, who sacrificed himself to save Aladar and the others during a cave-in. The second and last one was killed during a fight with Aladar and a Tyrannosaurus named Tex on a top of a cliff, where it starts to break under its weight, causing it to fall to its death.

Additional Voices

 * Matt Adler - Bruton's Scout
 * Sandina Bailolape
 * Edie Lehmann Boddicker
 * Zachary Bostrom
 * Catherine Cavadini - Female Lemurs
 * Holly Dorff
 * Greg Finley - Male Lemur
 * Jeff Fischer
 * Barbara Iley
 * David Allen Kramer
 * Susan Stevens Logan
 * David McCharen
 * Tracy Metro
 * Daran Norris
 * Bobbi Page
 * Noreen Reardon
 * Chelsea Russo
 * Evan Sabara - Young Zini
 * Aaron Spann
 * Melaine Spore
 * Andrea Taylor
 * John Walcutt
 * Camille Winbush
 * Billy West
 * Jim Cummings
 * Charlie Adler

Production
While a dinosaur-related computer-animated film had been contemplated for over a decade, the film finally went into production when it did, as "the technology to produce the stunning visual effects" had come about - a few years before Dinosaur's eventual release in 2000. The CGI effects are coupled with "real-world backdrops to create a 'photo-realistic' look". The crew went all around the world in order to "record dramatic nature backgrounds" for the film, which were then "blended with the computer-animated dinosaurs". Disney said that the over-$100 million visual effects "make the film an 'instant classic'".

The concept for the film was originally conceived by Paul Verhoeven and Phil Tippett in 1988 and was pitched as a stop-motion animated film with the title Dinosaurs. The film's original main protagonist was a Styracosaurus and the main antagonist was originally a Tyrannosaurus Rex. The film was originally going to be much darker and violent in tone and would end with the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, which would ultimately result in the deaths of the film's characters. Paul Verhoeven and Phil Tippett pitched the idea to Disney, only to have the idea for the film shelved away with the onset of the Disney Renaissance until the mid-1990s. The film was originally supposed to have no dialogue at all, in part to differentiate the film from The Land Before Time with which Dinosaur shares plot similarities. Michael Eisner insisted that the film have dialogue in order to make it more "commercially viable". A similar change was also made early in the production of The Land Before Time, which was originally intended to feature only the voice of a narrator.

The film's score was composed by James Newton Howard. Pop singer/songwriter Kate Bush reportedly wrote and recorded a song for the film but due to complications the track was ultimately not included on the soundtrack. According to HomeGround, a Kate Bush fanzine, it was scrapped when Disney asked Bush to rewrite the song and Bush refused; however, according to Disney, the song was cut from the film when preview audiences did not respond well to the track. In Asia, pop singer Jacky Cheung's song Something Only Love Can Do, with versions sung in English, Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese, was adopted as the theme song for the film.

In May of 1996, Jurassic Park author and Twister screenwriter Michael Crichton wrote the script with Thom Enriquez, John Harrison and Robert Nelson Jacobs as they would originally take the script to Universal Pictures and Paramount Pictures, but at the same time of the production, The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), Universal and Paramount couldn't accept it. Crichton decided to take the script to Disney as they agreed to take the script to Walt Disney Feature Animation.

In May of 1998, Disney's CEO, Michael Eisner, had a lunch conversation with Saving Private Ryan and Jurassic Park director Steven Spielberg at Tomorrowland Terrace at Disneyland Park in Anaheim, California. Eisner told Spielberg to sign the contract to direct Dinosaur. Spielberg confirmed that he would direct and produce it as he told Eisner that it would pay homage to the Jurassic Park franchise.

Filming began on June 26, 1998 and ended on September 30. Spielberg used the Iguanodon and the Tyrannosaurus as the protagonists while he used the Carnotaurus as the antagonist. At the premiere of George Lucas's 1999 epic space opera film, Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace, Industrial Light & Magic would create the titular dinosaurs while Dream Quest Images would create the lemurs. Walt Disney Pictures would release the film on May 19, 2000 with a co-production of Amblin Entertainment and The Kennedy/Marshall Company.

The Countdown to Extinction attraction at the Disney's Animal Kingdom theme park, was renamed and re-themed to the movie. It is now known as Dinosaur but the storyline was always intended to tie in with the movie, considering the usage of a Carnotaurus as the ride's antagonist and Aladar as the Iguanodon that guests rescue from the meteor and take back into the present, seen wandering the Dino Institute in Security Camera footage seen on monitors in the attraction's unloading area.

Dinosaur combines the use of live-action backgrounds with computer animation of prehistoric creatures, while the titular dinosaurs were created with groundbreaking computer-generated imagery by Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), produced by Walt Disney Feature Animation's Computer Graphics Unit that was later merged with Dream Quest Images to create Disney's The Secret Lab department. The Secret Lab department closed in 2002.

Critical response
Dinosaur received generally favorable-to-positive reviews from critics. The review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reported that 95% of critics gave the film positive reviews, based on 210 reviews (150 "Fresh" and 60 "Rotten"); with an average score of 8.2/10. The overall consensus on the site was: "Steven Spielberg's Dinosaur pays homage to the Jurassic Park franchise as it delivers spectacular computer-animation and astonishing visual effects. Although the plot looks similar to The Land Before Time." Roger Ebert gave the film three stars out of four praising the film's "amazing visuals" but criticizing the decision to make the animals talk, which he felt cancelled out the effort to make the film so realistic. "An enormous effort had been spent on making these dinosaurs seem real, and then an even greater effort was spent on undermining the illusion" was his final consensus. The overall rating of Dinosaur on Metacritic from critics is 86%, with 25 critics giving positive reviews, 22 giving mixed reviews, and 5 giving negative reviews.

The lemurs depicted in the movie strongly resemble the sub-species Verreaux's sifaka. Biologists have raised concerns that the movie is misleading and could potentially confuse people, as it suggests lemurs (in their present evolved state) co-existed with dinosaurs over 65 million years ago. All modern strepsirrhines including lemurs are traditionally thought to have evolved from 'primitive' primates known as adapiforms during the Eocene (56 to 34 mya) or Paleocene (65 to 56 mya).