For even anyone who didn’t already think that Disney’s Dinosaur was horrible, bland, and lame, comes my belief on Disney’s ill-fated, ill-received, forgotten but important, innovative and awesome CGI film, Dinosaur (2000).

Overlooked and Dismissed on its initial release on May 19, 2000, Disney’s Dinosaur is still an important milestone in VFX and Animation History and a Disney Masterpiece ahead of its time. It is the first movie to blend all 3D CGI animated characters with a world fabricated from Live Action Backgrounds.

Released right between a brutal high school shooting at Columbine High on April 1999 (just two months before Disney’s innovative Tarzan was released in theatres in June 1999) and an even more brutal Al Qaeda Terrorist Attack on the World Trade Center in New York on a tranquil Tuesday morning, September 11, 2001, Dinosaur probably couldn’t come along at a worse time in terms of its goals of becoming a popular success.

The uproar over its talking dinosaurs and lemurs and its script may have contributed to the film’s initial lack of acceptance, but Disney’s Dinosaur still threw down the gauntlet among VFX and animation professionals for what have been the most persuasive use of CGI characters and live action backgrounds.

The origins of Disney’s Dinosaur actually date all the way back to 1988, when the studio’s live-action division acquired a screenplay called "Dinosaur" by Walon Green. At that time, Paul Verhoeven and Phil Tippett were interested in making the film but it would have been very different now. It would have stayed 100% true and faithful to the tradition of Walon Green’s 1988 screenplay.

Anyway, towards the end of 1994, Walt Disney Feature Animation got their hands on Dinosaur and began shooting various tests, placing CG characters in miniature model backdrops before deciding to take the unprecedented route of combining live-action scenery with computer-generated character animation in either 1995 or 1996.

Six years in the (actual) making and with a budget of approximately $127 million (some reports have it as being much higher!); Dinosaur is STILL one of Disney’s biggest, important, and innovative animated movies. It’s also one of its biggest risks, for you guys threw everything you could at this VERY important masterpiece at the time of its release.

Dinosaur, co-directed by Ralph Zondag, who also co-directed We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story (1993) and Eric Leighton, a stop-motion animator, is only the second PG-rated animated feature the studio has ever released but that changed with the release of the recent Pirates of the Caribbean movies.

There ain’t any singing in the film, other than the earth-shaking roars and calls of the dinosaurs, and the character design is extremely realistic. Disney is hoping the action-packed film will draw teenage and adult audiences, but all of you kept slamming it for its characters and story!!!!

One of the key themes of Dinosaur is also a description of the production process: it's not about one individual but rather the strength of the group. The credit sequence says it all: You got the two directors and a production crew of over 500 people. The artists were organized in teams according to the stages of production: Visual Development & Character Design, Workbook, Look Development, Model Development, Digital Image Planning, Animation and Scene Finaling, aided by production staff and several teams devoted to technology, software implementation and rendering.

From the storyboards by even Thom Enriquez, a "3D Workbook" was created to give all of the department supervisors an idea of what each scene will look like. Using the 3D workbook as reference, a film unit shot background plates in beautiful and exotic locales around the world, including Australia, Venezuela and Samoa, all over an 18-month period. This footage was digitized and composited to create fantastic settings that never existed in the real world.

48 animators worked on the film, one-third of who were already versed in computer animation, while the other two thirds came from traditional hand-drawn animation and stop-motion animation backgrounds. Early on, Eric Leighton recruited several animators he knew from being a supervising animator on The Nightmare Before Christmas including Mike Belzer, Joel Fletcher, Angie Glocka, Owen Klatte and Trey Thomas, right?

But learning the ropes at Disney was like starting from scratch because of differences in the proprietary software at both studios. The animators worked mainly in Softimage, but the Dinosaur software group wrote 70,000 lines of code to fine-tune the controls for the animators.

They animated fleshed-out skeletons (Model Development Supervisor Sean Phillips compares the rough model parts to Tootsie Rolls) for the first run, then after rough animation, the Model TDs (technical directors) added muscles according to the animators' directions.
The extreme realism in the animation of the dinosaurs w

tl;dr

the movie is forgiveable due to great animation

It was an awesome movie, but nearly forgotten. :(

Yeah, Skeptical fans and critics have thrown they could at Disney's Dinosaur, but very soon, most will be silenced by my belief. This movie is forgiveable despite nasty reviews.

That was a long post.

Well, you've said that Disney ain't gonna do what Pixar have done. They've tried with Chicken Little and though it was not as successful as Disney thought it to be, it was a success in Disney Digital 3D, and thus, Disney Digital 3D was born. In the future, even in the 2010's, Disney's Dinosaur would now be considered one of Disney's timeless masterpieces, despite the script.

Why, yes, I understand. It's a forigivable movie due to great animation, character designs, and effects. And, futuramafan95, in the future, even in the 2010's, Dinosaur will now be considered one of Disney's masterpieces, despite the unbelievably bad script (which to Disney fans and critics was even scarier than Jar Jar Binks and other aspects of Star Wars Episode I The Phantom Menace.)

Well, I understand, RetroRickster923.

The fact that the main characters are dinosaurs, the fact that the main character struggled for power, the fact that the dinosaurs talk, the fact that the main character was spearated from his kind when he was very young (as it turns out, he was still an egg when he was separated), the fact that different species of prehistoric animals, or dinosaurs, banded together to reach a goal, far, far, away, and to overcome differences to avoid being killed by predators, and the fact that the main character was raised by primate-like creatures (called Lemurs), among other things, is what made you people scream it copied Don Bluth's 1988 cartoon, The Land Before Time, Disney's The Lion King (1994) and especially, Disney's Tarzan (1999).

Disney's Dinosaur, was, in fact, loosely based on The Countdown to Extinction ride at Animal Kingdom at Walt Disney World, which was renamed Dinosaur, but it was often speculated to have been greatly inspired by Don Bluth's 1988 cartoon, The Land Before Time, Disney's The Lion King (1994) and especially, Disney's animated version of Tarzan (1999), due to numerous similarities between the four animation works. Some believe to be so.

Well, anyway, skeptical fans and critics have thrown everything they could at Disney's Dinosaur, but very soon, most will be silenced by my belief or something like that. This movie is forgiveable despite nasty reviews, RetroRickster923. Get it? Forgivable because of great animation, character design, and effects, in spite of it being overlooked and dismissed when released on May 2000.

Ah, "Dinosaurs", I saw this one in the theaters and it easily counts as one of my biggest disappointments. This is because, apparently, "Disney" focused so much on the technical stuff that they forgot what truly makes a movie (or any work of fiction) come alive; namely, a good plot and appealing, memorable characters. Certainly, there are animated movies that I dislike more, but I can't think of any animated movie I've seen that sported such instantly forgettable characters as "Dinosaurs". Usually, no matter what I thought of a movie, I'm at least able to remember some of the characters, even if it's been years since I last saw it. With "Dinosaurs" however, my memory is completely blank. I can barely remember the main character's name; Aladar, wasn't it?

In conclusion: If you like this movie, that's fine, we all have our own opinions, but I'm afraid that I will never be able to see the inherent superiority of it.

I liked this movie. The dinosaures were actually highly accurate in their designs and the animation was great. Too bad it falls under the "Obscure Disney Movies" category.

Are you a star?