Dinosaur

Release Date: May 19, 2000

Watch Date: April 21, 2024

“Join the action-packed adventure of a group of dinosaurs overcoming enormous challenges through courage, loyalty and hope in this special-effects phenomenon. Set 65 million years ago, this is the story of Aladar, an iguanodon who is separated from his own kind and raised by a clan of lemurs, including the wisecracking Zini and the compassionate Plio. When a meteor shower destroys their home, Aladar and his family follow a herd of dinosaurs heading for the safety of the “nesting grounds.” Along the way, Aladar befriends Baylene, an elderly brachiosaur; Eema, an unstoppable styracosaur; and Neera, a feisty fellow iguanodon. Together, they must stand strong amidst food and water shortages, the threat of carnotaur attacks, and Aladar’s run-ins with the herd’s stubborn leader, Kron.”

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   Based on nothing but image alone, Bob tried for a very long time to make me forget this movie existed.

   See, he’d never seen it, but I’d grown up loving it, and he didn’t really feel like, based on the one image he’d seen, that it was going to be that good. And I love my husband, and he’ll watch a lot of movies he considers to be terrible for me, because he knows my taste in film is a lot more eclectic than his, but one thing he really struggles with is bad CGI (don’t ask me why), so an entire film of what appeared to be very aged CGI set against a backdrop of real sets…well that just didn’t appeal to him.

   But it’s my birthday month, and he’s decided you can’t veto on birthday month now, so we’re watching ‘Dinosaur’!

   Now here’s what I knew, and Bob didn’t, and more’s the pity honestly but at the same time it was great watching him experience it – this film has a lot of heart. And I mean, a lot of heart. It is not afraid to pull punches. Dinosaurs bleed. They have weight. They die. Corpses are shown. This film is not afraid to scare a child. The trek to the nesting grounds is long and brutal, and it feels long and brutal and I love it very much.

   My only sore spot, and really Bob’s only major complaint too, was the lemurs. Now, I understand the point of their characters. A dinosaur being raised by something smaller, a mammal, something surviving the extinction to ostensibly turn into us, but the lemurs just don’t look good. The dinosaurs, they all kind of fit together, and you don’t notice any bad CGI because together they all kind of look good. But the lemurs…the way their fur sits on them just isn’t quite right. And while I think the mother, grandfather and friend are used alright, I don’t think Suri was very necessary at all. It’s almost adds too many characters in the rag tag group, like Url, the ankylosaur(?), who acts more like a dog despite every other dinosaur having some sense of human like intelligence.

   I’m not saying people aren’t different and don’t have different mental capabilities, because it’s true and we do, but we also wouldn’t say any of us are only capable of acting like a loyal family pet either.

   But all in all, I think this film isn’t afraid to touch on deep themes, it isn’t afraid to throw it’s weight around a little bit, it isn’t afraid to show suffering and to give you moments of hopelessness, and to ratchet up the tension. Is it the best animated film Disney’s ever made? By no means. But it’s pretty unique for what they were doing at the time, and since, and I definitely don’t think it deserves to be so relegated to shadows as it has been.

   The McDonald’s happy meal toys that came along with the original release of the film though? Those should be regulated to the shadows. Or a pit. Don’t look them up. Trust me.