Until relatively recently—well after its initial release—Dinosaur was not considered part of the official Disney canon of animated films. Oh, certainly, it had been released under the Disney name. It opened with the Walt Disney logo. It contained several typical Disney elements and themes—celebrity name those voices, adorable animals, a young protagonist trying to find a place where he could fit in, and a focus on accepting people who look different. The Disney theme parks sold Dinosaur related merchandise, especially at the Animal Kingdom park, which had an entire dinosaur section. And the film featured then-state of the art animation.
And yet, Disney executives initially claimed, this was not—no matter what it looked or sounded like—part of the official canon. It was something completely different.
Admittedly, the “official” list had always been incomplete, leaving out, as it did, the combined live action/animated films like Victory Through Air Power, The Reluctant Dragon, Mary Poppins and Pete’s Dragon. That precedent was one reason why Dinosaur was initially left out of the official lists—like those films, Dinosaur combined live footage with animation. But the main reason was something else entirely: unlike those films, and every other film in the Disney animated canon, Dinosaur, whatever the logo said, was not entirely or even mostly the product of the Disney Animation Studio. Instead, it was the product of two things: Disney’s hope of cashing in on animated dinosaurs, and a new Disney initiative: the Secret Lab.
The Secret Lab, launched to great public fanfare in 1999, was not initially intended to be a full animation studio. Rather, it was the result of a Disney executive decision to merge the recently acquired Dream Quest Images, a special effects studio purchased in 1996, with the Disney Animation Studio CGI artists, in the hopes of creating a computer animation and effects studio that could potentially rival Pixar—while still providing special effects sequences for various Disney live action films.
Meanwhile, shortly before buying Dream Quest, Disney CEO Michael Eisner and others had noticed that a little series of films called Jurassic Park, which combined CGI dinosaurs with live action footage and actors, were doing remarkably well at the box office and attracting young, dinosaur-loving audiences. They ordered Disney’s new Animal Kingdom, then in the planning and development stage, to add a dinosaur section and a dinosaur ride—however oddly that section might fit in a park which also offered a safari ride showcasing still living animals. And Eisner ordered Disney’s film division to start looking for a nice, family friendly dinosaur project that could draw in the same business as Jurassic Park.
As it turned out, the special effects guys already had a dinosaur project on hand—if not quite the one that executives had in mind. They planned to use the stop motion effects developed by stop motion animation artist David Allen, used in Disney’s Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, for a nice, grim little dinosaur film that would include lots of dinosaurs eating each other and end with lots of dinosaurs getting smushed by an incoming asteroid and going extinct. To maintain a certain scientific accuracy—kinda—it would be entirely dialogue free—something that would also help distinguish it from the Land Before Time films.
Eisner was all for dinosaurs eating each other, but he did not think that audiences would show up for a dialogue-free dinosaur film, even a dialogue-free dinosaur film with a T-Rex. And, perhaps remembering that the sequence of dinosaurs plodding off to their doom in Fantasia is rarely cited as anyone’s favorite moment in that film, he wanted a slightly happier ending than the mass extinction of every character in the film. The extinction event was moved closer to the beginning of the film, voice actors were hired, and Disney got ready to add in the now traditional top 40 pop song—although that ended up getting cut from the final version of the film. He also demanded that instead of stop motion animation, the newly formed Secret Lab use CGI dinosaurs against real, live action backgrounds—just like in Jurassic Park, except with much better scenery.
In a last blow to both the original concept and the final film—when Disney realized that the film that would eventually be The Emperor’s New Groove would not be ready in time to fulfill cross promotional deals with McDonalds and Coke, Eisner also demanded that Dinosaur’s planned release date be moved up several months to fill in the gap. Final production was, in a word, rushed.
The animators did at least get their way in the opening sequence, where, after some bland narration about the importance of little people and big people and whatever, the camera opens up to show a dinosaur mother who, for a reason not exactly explained until later, has chosen to put her nest smack dab in the middle of a popular dinosaur gathering spot. It’s not exactly the planet’s safest spot for a nest of vulnerable dinosaur eggs, but it does let the camera soar over the spectacular sight of large herds of dinosaurs eating, tending their eggs, and mulling around right until a massive predator shows up—sending them scattering in a dinosaur stampede.
The dinosaur nest ends up mostly smushed, with only one egg surviving. That egg is immediately snatched up by little dinosaurs, who soon lose it themselves, sending the egg off into a soaring adventure through water (showing off water effects animation) and air (showing off the technical wizardry of having an animated cartoon pterosaur follow sped up helicopter footage), zipping over more dinosaurs and through spectacular scenery (showing off some awesome aerial shots) before dumping the egg (showing off plot contrivance) near a group of little lemurs (showing off individual strands of animated fur, then still a relatively new technique in computer animation).
This entire dialogue-free sequence is magnificent, giving a good sense of what this film could and should have been. Alas, it’s all downhill from here. To be fair, with its mix of swooping, rushing camera movements and animated dinosaurs, it also triggered my severe vertigo, forcing me to watch this film over a several day period, something which undoubtedly contributed to my overall response to the film. But I don’t think it’s my vertigo that makes most of the rest of the film seem to go so remarkably awry.
No, that would be the voicing—something animators didn’t want, but Eisner did. The problem is not the vocal work itself—most of the voice actors here are fine as far as that goes. But rather that, after spending several minutes setting up a beautiful, hostile, dinosaur world, with the real very backgrounds almost convincing me that yes, the camera really had traveled back in time and recorded very real dinosaurs (even if the dinosaurs on screen actually come from different periods, but let us not quibble too much about that in a film that has dinosaurs and lemurs playing together) the film manages to lose this illusion mere seconds after the lemurs start to talk. By the time the lemurs start to fixate on getting laid, that illusion is completely lost.
It does not help much to have Joan Plowright show up later as an elderly dinosaur sporting a British accent, making me wonder just how she had picked up a different accent than all of the other dinosaurs, while the dinosaurs and lemurs, shown growing up in separate locations and never interacting until the middle of the film, all sport American accents. It’s admittedly a minor point, but it strikes a discordant note in a film that is otherwise trying to feel “realistic” and “accurate.”
Back in the plot, the lemurs decide to adopt the hatching little baby dinosaur even though he could grow up into a huge monster. Cue cut to little lemurs fleeing from a huge monster dinosaur—who of course turns out to be just playing. Jurassic Park this isn’t. The film then wastes some time getting lemurs to hook up for some sexy times in the trees while casually pointing out the first of many huge plot holes—they’ve never seen another dinosaur on the island. Which begs the question: then HOW DID THEY KNOW THAT THE LITTLE BABY DINOSAUR WOULD GROW UP INTO A BIG MONSTER DINOSAUR? The lemurs also throw around some cringeworthy gendered dialogue.
Luckily at this point a huge asteroid crashes nearby destroying pretty much everything they know.
This is another magnificent sequence—in part because it has very little dialogue, in part because of the special effects for the asteroid and the resulting tsunami, which really are good—although I’m fairly sure, given the size of the explosion and the effect of the impact, that the tsunami should actually be higher. I’m also not sure how they ended up that close to the explosion, given that they are apparently in Madagascar, or close to it, and the crater for this event is in the kinda far away Yucatan. I know the continents have shifted quite a lot since then but this still seems like a stretch. But I was trying not to quibble and only focus on the major issues. Moving on. During all this, the dinosaur—Aladar—manages to save the lemurs of his adoptive family, and only them, either because of plot contrivance or because Aladar isn’t the sort to try to save little lemurs who didn’t adopt him. You decide. Then again, given how close they seemed to be to the explosion, I’m also kinda shocked that any of them survived at all.
The group lands in a now desolate, burned land, and starts looking—mostly silently—for water. Instead, they find the last remnants of a herd of dinosaurs trying to head back to the Nesting Grounds—oh, that’s why Aladar’s mother put her nest right in the middle of a dinosaur stampede area, got it, going on. Their search is another beautifully animated sequence. But after this, the film devolves into a bland, clichéd, plot hole ridden tussle between the herd leader, Kron, and Aladar.
Kron—quite sensibly for a dinosaur leader facing a barren landscape and no water after an apocalyptic asteroid strike—wants to push the herd as fast and as hard as possible to the Nesting Grounds, which has water and food. Aladar—less sensibly—wants to work together to save everyone, even the weak and the helpless and the old, something that would sound just a bit more convincing if you hadn’t just let all of those little lemurs who WEREN’T members of your adoptive family drown, Aladar, but again, moving on. Not complicating things as much as the movie would like, Aladar falls in love with Kron’s sister, Neera, who—despite being a DINOSAUR—may well be the single blandest love interest in Disney history, difficult as this may be to believe.
Also, a couple of velociraptors and carnotauruses show up. They never speak, making them automatically more awesome than all of the other characters in the film, but they also don’t get to eat that many dinosaurs, which distinctly subtracts quite a bit from that awesomeness. The carnotauruses, incidentally, were originally supposed to be T-Rexes, until Disney decided that really, Dinosaur didn’t have to borrow from Jurassic Park all that much, and could make at least that change. Velociraptors, however, had been such big hits in the earlier film that Disney did decide to keep them.
Anyway, this leads to scene after scene of dinosaurs tired and weary and sad that they are getting set such a punishing pace, although GIVEN THAT THEY ARE GETTING CHASED BY VELOCIRAPTORS MAYBE THERE’S A REASON TO TRY TO SPEED THINGS UP, COMPLAINERS. Naturally—it is a Disney movie—Aladar is pretty much always right about everything, and Kron is pretty much always wrong, and we learn Important Lessons About Friendship and Never Giving Up and Why You Should Listen To People Who Tell You That Really You Should Not Try To Climb The Huge Pile of Rocks When Dinosaurs Are Chasing You. (Spoiler: because the dinosaurs will eat you.)
It’s all meant to be very moving, and emotional, but it never quite works—partly because the plot, despite the velociraptors, is pretty predictable and dull, partly because everyone’s priorities seem a bit off, and partly because of the many plot holes. The glaring one is the one that ostensibly drives the film: the hunt for water. I can buy that the dinosaurs, here depicted less as proto-birds and more as cold blooded reptiles, can survive for several days without water. Well, kinda buy, given that when we first saw them, they lived in an area with abundant fresh drinking water, and two dinosaurs later explain that they always were able to find lakes and water on their way to the Magical Hatching Grounds, suggesting that they never had the chance to evolve into creatures who could survive without water for a few days. But it’s not completely improbable. I can’t believe that the lemurs, who start off the film in a rainforest surrounded by abundant water, could survive, much less continue talking for this long, without keeling over from dehydration.
Plus, the film’s happy ending feels off. It’s not just that it’s hard to believe that the Magical Hatching Grounds magically survived the otherwise complete destruction of the asteroid—which drained lakes, broke mountains, sunk at least one island, and immediately killed off the vegetation everywhere else—and moreover, survived this impact completely untouched, but the film initially presented this as the extinction of the dinosaurs, not as the next step in their evolution into birds. The final moments feel all wrong.
To be fair, Dinosaur does have some astonishing moments—the opening sequence, the flight with the pterosaur carrying the dinosaur egg, the asteroid smashing into the earth, the slow search for water. And a few dinosaurs do get eaten, so this is a plus. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that all of these sequences contain either no or very little dialogue, and I can’t help but wish the entire film had stayed with the non dialogue button, but it might be worth checking out these sequences, as long as your fingers remain very close to the fast forward button.
Dinosaur did decently at the box office, bringing in $349.8 million. Dinoland USA in Disney’s Animal Kingdom was a decided hit (it helped that, for the first few years after its opening, it was one of the few parts of the Florida park that offered air conditioning), and dinosaur toys flew off the shelves. On paper, it was a success. But the box office total was not only well under the $1 billion or so brought in by Jurassic Park, it was nowhere near the huge, blowout numbers Disney had not so secretly been hoping from their first computer animated/live backdrops film, not to mention from a film that ended up being the most expensive release of 2000.
It may have been the listless plot, or the bland characters, few of whom stood out. Or the unfortunate timing of getting rushed out to meet contractual marketing deadlines meant for another film, only to be released just a couple of months after the BBC/Discovery Channel Walking With Dinosaurs—a miniseries that combined live backdrops, computer animation and puppets, and which, despite its “documentary” label, had much better dinosaur fights. Or simply that although a case can be made for making the “scientific” documentary Walking With Dinosaurs, it’s much harder to see why, after Jurassic Park, the world really needed another animated/live action dinosaur movie. Or at least, an animated/live action dinosaur movie featuring dinosaurs chasing dinosaurs instead of adorable kiddies and lawyers and Chris Pratt.
Whatever the reason, it was a disappointment. One year later, Disney quietly closed the Secret Lab, and began contemplating other ways to compete with Pixar and Dreamworks—a thought process that eventually and unfortunately brought us Chicken Little. Most of the effects artists found themselves out of work; the CGI animators from the Disney Animation Studio found themselves right back with their old colleagues, helping to deal with the technical challenges of yet another ambitious film. One we’ll get to in a couple of weeks—right after we discuss the film that sent poor Dinosaur out into the wild months earlier than planned.
The Emperor’s New Groove, coming up next.
Mari Ness lives in central Florida.
I completely forgot that I even saw this movie until you mentioned the lemurs. Just to back up how incredibly pointless this movie was.
Feh.
I still love lemurs, though.
People always forget that most of the dinosaur effects in Jurassic Park were not CGI, but were full-size animatronic puppets that were physically present on the set and genuinely interacting with the cast, which is why they were so convincing. After all, Spielberg originally expected to use the less convincing technique of stop-motion animation for the full-length running/jumping shots that couldn’t be done live, so the film was designed to use as few of those shots as possible, and the decision to do them in CGI instead was made at a relatively late stage. So the CGI in the film was certainly revolutionary, but it’s wrong to give it the entire credit for the success of the film’s dinosaur effects. The animatronics deserve the bulk of the credit.
What bugs me about dinosaur stories is how obsessed people are with the extinction of the (non-avian) dinosaurs. I mean, the age of dinosaurs lasted 160 million years. That’s a third of the entire history of life on land. And of course one branch of dinosaurs, the birds, survived the extinction and thrived to this day. Dinosaurs, inclusive of birds, are probably the greatest ongoing success story in the history of vertebrate life, and yet we cling to the narrative that their one defining moment was their extinction. Maybe that’s ego — we’re jealous of the thought of any other order of life dominating our planet, so if we’re going to tell a story about the age of their dominance, it has to end with their eradication and a promise that those dinky little mammals will go on to rule the Earth in their place. We celebrate dinosaurs, but only so long as we can reassure ourselves that they’re gone. (Except for the birds, who are probably more likely than we are to survive the next mass extinction, for the same reason mammals survived the last one — because they’re small.)
I remember being wowed by a preview that covered the wordless opening sequence, and then deciding not to see the movie after all once I’d read a review that basically said “That opening was awesome, and then it’s all talking lemurs from that point on.” But in this review of it, I’m mostly struck by how much this is Land Before Time all over again. Except with, apparently, more talking lemurs. Talking about their sex lives. Oh god.
Surely there are dinosaur movie plots to be found that aren’t about orphaned baby dinosaurs trying to find their way back to a legendary Land Of Plenty after the meteor strikes. Right? I mean, these people did a whole movie about the perils of having your mother transformed into a bear because you don’t want to do princess things, surely they can come up with an even vaguely novel dino plot. At least one that doesn’t belong to a cartoon from decades before.
@3/fadeaccompli: Brave was Pixar, not Disney. Disney owns Pixar, but they have different creative teams — and as Mari said, this film was made before Disney bought Pixar, and was produced by a unit created specifically to compete with Pixar. And the two films have no writers, producers, or directors in common.
I’ve only seen this movie all the way through to the end once. Also a random 45 minutes or so on cable. I don’t remember the opening sequence at all. I remember the lemurs. Could have really skipped the whole mating season bit and been really happy. I always thought of it as a Land Before Time knock off before they started making 14 sequels to LBT. This is not a Disney movie I or my nephews will watch over and over again.
This movie was a colossal disappointment for me. I own it, as I do almost all Disney movies, but I think the only time I ever watched it was in the theater. I remember being absolutely astonished by the trailer, thinking that they had done something truly groundbreaking, and then being disappointed to see that only the visuals were great. But the story was such a half-hearted, empty, unfunny Land Before Time retread that the visuals just couldn’t save it. In retrospect I feel like the movie is a bit like watching Episode II if you watch only the Anakin/Padme scenes in between the Coruscant chase and the Geonosis finale. Actually, that’s a terrible analogy. But my point remains that the plot is overwhelmingly tedious.
I have always found it interesting that the ride at Animal Kingdom is about 1000 times more intense than the movie. Like, as a 20-year old, I thought Countdown to Extinction (or whatever they call it now, I think just Dinosaur) was legitimately scary and waaaay too intense for kids under 10.
I have never seen this film, and have no memory of it even coming out. Of course, it seems to have been released at that point in my life when Disney movies were low-priority for me, being a young adult without kids at the time. But the ride at Animal Kingdom…hoo-boy, I remember that.
When my wife and I took our (then) ten-year-old to Disney for the first time, he was sort of leery about riding dark rides, of which Disney has quite a few, so my wife thought that Dinosaur would be a good ride to introduce him to the concept. This was an error. Naturally, the ride car is at ground zero for the meteor strike, and gets jostled by raptors and roared at by a T-Rex, which straight-up terrified my son. As my wife was holding onto him, the best “good parent” thing I could do was set an example by pretending to be completely bored and unfazed by all the scary stuff, which wasn’t easy. After, I asked my wife what she’d expected from a ride called “Dinosaur,” and she said she figured this was Disney, so it would be cute baby dinosaurs frolicking about and such. If we had any idea of the plot of this movie, or that there even was a movie, we probably would have made a different decision. As it was, he refused any dark rides for the rest of the trip, including Harry Potter at Universal, which is admittedly a pretty intense dark ride, but he’s a huge Harry Potter fan, so that was a bummer.
Edit: Well, Pat D, it looks like we’re in agreement on the intensity of this ride.
#2 Perhaps ego and jealousy does play some part in seeing the age of dinosaurs come to a calamitous end, but keep in mind the disaster and post-apocalyptic genres sell a lot of tickets. And this movie was made during the time of Armageddon, Deep Impact, Volcano, Dante’s Peak, Independence Day, etc. People like to watch things go blooey, and then the aftermath of the blooey.
@@@@@ChristopherLBennett Oh, well, in that case, it totally makes sense that Disney would recycle a tired dinosaur plot done by another company with another team ages ago.
(showing off plot contrivance)
Your writing still makes me very entertained (unlike the movie), Mari Ness.
#7 Brian, sorry to hear that the ride traumatized your son so much, as he obviously missed out on some great rides that way. That was 16 years ago that I first ride that ride, they had just added the tie-in to the movie, and I assumed it would be no biggie. But I was legitimately scared on that ride. The combination of the dark, the noise, and the damned carnotaur, or T-Rex, whichever, roaring RIGHT NEXT TO ME, made me want off the ride as soon as possible. Yet somehow I rode it again 7 years later, and it was just as intense. When I finally go back next year, I’m thinking I’ll skip it.
@2
Has anyone checked to make sure Christopher L. Bennett isn’t a Silurian? His defense of dino supremacy sounds a bit suspicious…
Guess I’m odd man out on this movie. I loved it in the theater, I bought it on DVD, and I have rewatched it a couple of times. Thanks for reminding me of it, Mari! I’ll be watching this tonight!
@8/Arthur: Sure, people love disaster movies, but that’s only part of it. People still use “dinosaur” as a metaphor for something doomed to failure due to inability to adapt. I once saw a pro-vegetarian poster that made a lot of good points but also included the nonsensical claim that the dinosaurs died because they ate meat (never mind that the majority of dinosaurs were herbivores, because predators can only survive if they’re substantially outnumbered by their food supply). And it’s annoying because the dinosaurs were — and still are — a massively successful and enduring category of life, on a scale that hominids are not even remotely close to matching.
@12/CainS.Latrani: Honestly, my annoyance with the cliche of stories focusing on the death of the dinosaurs overlaps with my annoyance with the cliche of focusing on the dinosaurs as the end-all and be-all of prehistoric life. I’d love to see more focus on the overlooked orders of life that were around before and after the age of dinosaurs. The producers of Walking With Dinosaurs did sequels about life forms from other times in prehistory, and the fiction series Primeval from the same production company featured them as well, but aside from that, the general public doesn’t seem to realize there were any prehistoric life forms between trilobites, dinosaurs, and mammoths.
#14 Oh I disagree. The dinosaurs were a complete failure. They had 160 million years to produce their own Bruce Willis to fly up there and make that asteroid go blooey. Instead they wasted their time evolving into little feathered things that go great with barbecue sauce. But hey, thumbs up for that, dinosaurs. Your lack of ambition is forgiven. :-)
Just wanted to second all those saying that the Dinosaur ride is very intense. My second cousin is an army brat, moved around a lot, seen the world, very unflappable about action movies and such. But he was terrified by that ride and near traumatized for the rest of the day. Even as a recent high grad at the time, I remember it being way more scary than most of the other dark rides.
Sidebar: as someone who has since that time also worked at Disney World, I highly recommend all parents ask about age appropriateness/enjoyment if there is every a question. Everyone there is trained to help make your time more enjoyable, which includes explaining what’s in a ride and whether a child may or may not be OK with it.
However, I do ask this favor: if the person tells you it’s scary, and you know your child gets very frightened easily, please do not force that child to ride it anyway. You may think you are teaching the child a lesson in bravery; in reality, you are making the child and everyone around him miserable for the time the ride lasts (including the poor tour guide who has to try to narrate over the screams). I once had a child who began crying after I pointed out Mary Poppins rising into the air with her umbrella, and I knew it was going to be a long 20 minutes for that particular tour.
For some reason, dinosaurs have always interested me less than most animals. Maybe that’s why I don’t recall ever hearing about this one, though I was 11 when it came out and have worked in a paleontology museum (mostly staying out of the dinosaur rooms) since 2010. Or maybe not, as I greatly liked the Land Before Time movies Anyway, it sounds almost so-bad-it’s-good.
@16: I’ll trust you on that. My brother was afraid of roller coasters before riding any and loved them thereafter, but my only roller coaster ride was among the most terrifying experiences in my life. That was at Six Flags; I’ve never been to anything Disney.
@16 and sometimes the parent may not even know! My son (then about 3, I think), unexpectedly freaked out on the Carousel at Disneyland, to the point where the poor operator had to stop the ride to let him off. needless to say, we didn’t try Snow White or Peter Pan on that trip.
I remember the trailers for Dinosaur, and thought it looked pretty meh about it then and I never saw the movie.
So wait… they were trying to differentiate themselves from Jurassic Park, so they ditched the T-Rex, but kept the completely ahistorical Velociraptors? (Unless the raptors were the size of turkeys and not particularly threatening to large sauropods, but it doesn’t sound like that’s the case…)
I’m a sucker for dinosaur stories, but the weird human voices coming out of photorealistic dinosaurs killed any potential interest in this for me when it came out, and from this writeup, it sounds like I made the right call.
Never seen it; based on this (extremely entertaining) review, I probably never will.
I also have vague memories that when Dinosaur first came out on DVD, it gave at least some DVD players fits & starts.
I also wasn’t super impressed with Pixar’s The Good Dinosaur.
Wow, was I the only one who saw the other movie? The one that started with the little orphaned dinosaur being taken in by the family of tiny critters who only knew third-hand stories, all scary, presumably from somebody who’d been to the mainland and back long ago? And yet, they took a chance on the little guy, and he grew up to be everybody’s amiable big brother? And he managed to save some people, coincidentally just his family members, from a horrible disaster, while he was fighting just to breathe? And then they discovered that there was a lot they didn’t know about the world outside their island, but they found help just in time? Except that it turned out that the leader of the expedition was just a bullying strongman who was way out of his depth? And then the outcasts at the back of the pack got their moment to shine, putting all that survival-of-the-fittest-social-Darwinist crap in the trash heap? And they started life again? That story, with the friendships, kindnesses, and funny moments? Nobody else saw it?
From the perspective of a long-time dino nerd, I never thought that the impact at the beginning of the movie was The Big One. There were other big impacts during the Age of the Dinosaurs. This one looks like it devastated a huge area, but not the whole planet, or anything in the lee of a mountain range, such as the Nesting Grounds.
Yeah, that was definitely *an* asteroid impact, not *the* asteroid impact. Local disasters are just as apocalyptic for the people in them.
This movie was pretty but tiresome. I only watched it to see whether I could convince my son to watch more than 3 movies on the eternal repeat of the young. Once I’d got partway in, I almost feared that the dinosaurs would keep my son’s attention, because then I’d have to watch it over again. Thankfully they didn’t.
I have no idea why so many Disney rides have to have such dark dim lobbies. Once we’re on a moving ride, it’s one thing; things like the undersea visuals in the Nemo-themed ride at Epcot worked fine, and Pirates of the Caribbean scared him a little, but the dark entrances of several rides were in themselves almost too much for him to endure.
The movie was a bit stodgy for my tastes; as others have pointed out, it did have kind of an animal documentary vibe to it.
I like the ride at Animal Kingdom, but my wife refuses to ride it. She has back problems, and the ride caused her quite a bit of pain, because of the herky jerky motion of the vehicle. I also had problems with the ride’s motion, although not as bad as hers.
Disney and dinosaurs don’t mix very well. Fantasia, Dinosaur, The Good Dinosaur … I think they ought to just let this one lie down.
When this came out we ended up getting some kind of special preview tickets, so it was an outing with my mom and a cousin (I think I was a senior in high school). I remember enjoying it somewhat, but feeling like it was basically a retread of movies like Land Before Time and stuff like that. There is very little I remember about it (although, fun fact, I think one of the lemurs is voiced by Max Casella, whom I had a huge crush on when he was in Doogie Howser and I was a kid).
I don’t know how it is in the rest of the world, but in Europe Dinosaur is still not on the list of Disney canons. Instead The Wild has been included in the canon.
Why was Dinosaur added to the canon several years after its original release? This happened in 2008, and the reason was Tangled. It was the most expensive animated movie Disney had made, and they had to bring some attention to it. At that point there was 48 movies on the list. Tangled would have been number 49, and Winnie the Pooh number 50. But by adding Dinosaur, Tangled was given the honor of becoming number 50 instead, which would obviously give it a lot more attention. In other words; it was for financial reasons. Because of that, I refuse to include it on my own list of official Disney features.
So, we can get back from a trip to Disney and can confirm: The Dinosaur ride is ridiculously intense, despite it having a 40 inch height requirement (meaning both my 3 and 5 year olds were able to go on). I thought it was kind of awesome, actually, but the kids weren’t as enthused. Thankfully no hysterical screaming but they were pretty vocal afterwards about how they did not enjoy that ride. We ended up skipping the Lilo and Stitch ride as well since the description sounded similar and my kids were kind of ‘done’ with the dark/fast rides at that point. Although they did love Spaceship Earth, Peter Pan, Little Mermaid and similar type rides. My 5 year old insisted we ride Star Tours twice, but my 3 year old was done after one time, heh.
Kind of wish Disney had just released the opening as a short and foregone the rest.
Seriously, this opening is one of the best in all of Disney, ranking right up there with its Renaissance greats, but it’s marred by the ongoing Flintstone-vitamin-shaped sleeping pill that is the rest of the film. Even with a Styracosaur Della Reese.
Hating on a good movie, eh?