Movie Thoughts: Dinosaur (2000)

• Released: 19 May 2000
• Directed by: Eric Leighton, Ralph Zondag
• Running time: 1 hr 22 min
• Rating 4/5

Synopsis

An iguanodon raised by lemurs joins a herd of dinosaurs trekking through the arduous desert in search of the fertile nesting grounds.

My Thoughts

Goodbye, Disney Renaissance, hello Disney Experimental Era. There's some gems in this era, some duds. Let's see how things go. Starting off with: Dinosaur.

So I do have a nostalgia for this movie. I hyperfixated on dinosaurs as a kid, and this movie came out right about when this was going on, so it was a perfect fit for me, obviously. I loved it a lot as a kid, though I didn't watch it all that often (especially compared to the Land Before Time sequels). 

Going back into the film now, I didn't exactly expect it to get a score above 3. I know I really liked it as a kid, but I've seen tons of reviewers that really seem to dislike this movie. However, after re-watching it, I was very pleasantly surprised.

Is it all that original? Is it perfect? Absolutely not, especially compared to some of the gems of the Renaissance era, but damn, I just really love this film. It's definitely dated and has some lesser aspects, but I could also say that for some of the Renaissance movies.

The visuals are probably something that puts some people off these days. It uses live-action landscapes with CGI creatures on it, and that CGI hasn't aged very well. However, I could easily look past that. The CGI in other early 2000s movies hasn't aged perfectly, either, and that doesn't ruin them for me most of the time. I also like the style this movie is going for. It's much more semi-realism rather than full cartoon (like The Good Dinosaur) or almost full realism (like Lion King 2019). The characters look like they are decent interpretations of dinosaurs, but they do have these expressive faces and defining features that makes each of them look unique. Probably not accurate to the real thing, but that's to be expected when making an animated movie. 

I also liked how the movie had some real consistency for wounds going on. When a character gets injured by a predator, they carry those wounds into other scenes, rather than just having them vanish in the next shot like a lot of cartoons do. They do heal eventually, Aladar doesn't retain scars from his encounters with Kron or the carnotaurs, but I do appreciate the consistency between scenes that fit the more semi-realistic tone of the visuals.

The characters are...honestly nothing amazing, but I can't help but really love them. Aladar is a really generic protagonist and Neera is a really generic love interest. But they do have these aspects to them that I can't help but appreciate. 

Aladar consistently always looks out for the little guy, even at the cost of his own safety. He doesn't even need to learn this, he just does it because it's the right thing to do. Neera has this more subtle arc of blindly going along with everything her brother (Kron) does to learning that one should look out for those weaker, rather than leaving them behind to die.

This arc is also shown more obviously in Bruton, who starts out as Kron's harsh right-hand man but after being left behind and getting some sense talked into him by Plio and Aladar, realizes that Kron's way was never the right one, and ends up sacrificing himself to allow Aladar and the elders to escape the carnotaurs.

The villain in the form of Kron definitely is one of the weaker aspects of the movie, but I do like his addition. It would've been so easy to just have the only major villains in the film be the carnotaurs (and I guess to a lesser extent the raptors), but they chose to add in a bit of "human" flair by having a sapient villain who even is the same species as Aladar. This just makes him feel a ton more personal rather than just some predator hunting them. He's not the most original villain as he has pretty standard goals and motivations, but he's rather effective at his job nonetheless.

There's also the two elderly lady dinosaurs, Baylene and Eema, who are just so enjoyable, with the former being all proper and the latter being more brash and loud. They are just really enjoyable characters.

The only characters I don't have much of an opinion on are Aladar's lemur family, who are just decent characters but don't have much to them, and Url, a dinosaur who for some reason is like a dog. At first I thought this movie operated on the logic that "all herbivorous dinosaurs are sentient and all predators aren't" but Url dismisses that theory. He also does practically nothing the entire movie so he might as well have been scrapped.

I also think this movie may just have one of my favorite Disney scores of all time. Seriously, this is one of the few Disney movies where I sometimes go back to listen to the score because it's just so damn good. The best one is obviously "The Egg Travels", but there's some other really good and memorable ones as well.

So, yeah, I didn't go into this movie thinking I'd enjoy it as much, but I absolutely do. It's dated visually and has its generic aspects, but it also does other things really well and I do care a lot about the characters despite how generic they can be in some aspects.