Disney Daze: Dinosaur

Dinosaur (2000)

Disney Animated Classic Number 39

Starring: D.B. Sweeney, Alfre Woodard, Ossie Davies, Max Casella, Hayden Panettiere, Samuel E. Wright & Julianna Marguiles

Directed by: Ralph Zondag & Eric Leighton

Rating: ★★

Remember that Disney classic Dinosaur? No? That’s probably because, just like the Cretaceous period, this is one of the many Disney films long since dead and buried.

Love, sex, death- Dinosaur has it all- and yet is somehow horribly boring.

I remember Dinosaur being released- but I never wanted to see it. It looked awful. And if children don’t want to watch a movie about dinosaurs, then you know there’s something really wrong with it.

Watch out! It's a dinosaur!

A jarringly hideous mix of live action backgrounds and CGI character animation, Dinosaur has not aged well. It looks dreadful. And Disney did not scrimp on bringing this strange technique to life, as the film cost $127.5 million to make. 

Dinosaur even has raptors, for no real reason except to cash in on Jurassic Park...

Luckily for them, Dinosaur somehow managed to turn a profit, as it was commended for its visuals but deservingly criticised for having a poor storyline and badly developed characters.

Yeah there's like a dog dinosaur or something...

And fifteen years later, both the visuals and the story are as dusty as fossilised bones. An ancient relic, Dinosaur is entirely unoriginal in every single way.  Think The Land Before Time crossed with The Poseidon Adventure mixed with The Lion King colliding into Brother Bearwith added elements of Tarzan. 

Watch out for the meteorites!

Dinosaur in a nutshell: a young outsider orphan navigates a journey filled with disastrous situations in order to save his friends and adopted family, and learns valuable life lessons about bullying or something.

There’s a reason why Dinosaur is not a museum centrepiece.

Another Disney Animated Classic stuck in development hell for years, it was put on the back burner in the 80s to allow better Disney Renaissance classics to shine- and also so it would not be compared to The Land Before Time. It certainly fails in this regard.

NOT Littlefoot.

Aladar (Sweeney) is an orphaned dinosaur raised by a bunch of lemurs. But when a meteor shower strikes during their annual mating season, almost all of the lemurs are wiped out. The survivors then find themselves journeying towards a sacred Nesting Ground- where they think they will be safe from the impending apocalypse. Sound familiar?

NOT Littlefoot's mother.

There’s even a few evil carnivorous dinosaurs to chase the protagonists, who are intentionally not Tyrannosaurus Rex but are incredibly similar. And just like a 70s disaster movie, there are some lovable characters and some villainous ones, who all must work together to escape the doomed environments they find themselves in.

NOT a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

The film begins inside an egg. Seriously. An egg travels around a poorly composited landscape, before hatching.  And that’s when we first see Aladar. Just like Tarzan, he is raised by a different species and feels like an outsider.

NOT Simba. Or Tarzan.

The most disturbing thing about the movie, apart from the fact it rips off every single other film ever made, are the dinosaurs’ faces. They look too human, and instantly creeped me out. This is the uncanny valley on a big scale- the dated CGI does not help, but the fact that the animators tried to ‘Disney-fy’ dinosaurs adds to the nightmare fuel.

Slightly too human...?

We’re introduced to the lemurs, who quickly go off to mate- leaving Aladar alone and wallowing in his virginity. But, honestly, he wouldn’t want to tap any lemur arse anyway, because they look like hairy rotting Mummies.

The lemurs are TERRIFYING

After almost all the lemurs die in a meteor shower, Aladar sets off onto his Land Before Timejourney to reach a breeding ground. There’s a lot of sex talk in this film- maybe Disney thought they were being edgy. Putting this to one side, watching migrating dinosaurs (unless it is Walking with Dinosaurs) is never really interesting, but it is definitely not made any better by the inclusion of stupid comic relief characters, or a vomit inducing love story.

Watching oorly animated dinosaurs walk really isn't very exciting...

That’s when The Poseidon Adventure plot kicks in- as Aladar and his companions are split off from the rest of the herd and fight to survive against their environment. Badly characterised dinosaurs start dying in various ways and then, in a rather odd anti-climax, they all get to the Nesting Grounds much faster than you think they will.

The End. Or is it...?

After a few more deaths and fight scenes against Tyrannosaurus Rex Carnotaurus, lemurs surf, babies piss on people and everyone gets laid. The cheeseometer explodes as we are treated to a morality lesson in listening, trusting and standing together, and we are then supposed to assume that everyone lives happily ever after even though we know their journey was for nothing as they will soon become extinct.

Sorry dinosaurs- there ain't a happy ending for you!

Dinosaur tries to line up a sequel which never happened, but, instead, this year Disney-Pixar will be releasing a new dinosaur movie titled The Good Dinosaur, probably in the hopes of higher toys sales and to permanently wipe this film from memory.

I'm so sorry Aladar, but it seems like even Disney wants you to become extinct...

Although Dinosauris not as terrible as some of the other Disney movies I’ve seen, the weak story, terrible animation and absolutely abysmal directing makes it entirely forgettable filler.

And they all live happily ever after. Except when they become extinct.

Dinosaur really is poor, even for Disney standards, but, as we now know, things will only getworse for the most famous film company in the world. Dinosaur is just the start of the Disney Dip- a decade of dreadful Disney failures: its mediocracy is just the forerunner to this cataclysmic catastrophe.