Dinosaur (2000): Favourite Films Series

Dinosaur (2000): Favourite Films Series

When you hear “Dinosaur Movies”, the first thing that comes to most people’s minds is Jurassic Park, and rightly so. It remains the benchmark for dinosaurs in the movies—every movie since its release in 1993 has had to try to live up to those enormous expectations. While I think it can be agreed no movie to feature dinosaurs has surpassed it since, there is one dinosaur movie that I don’t think gets enough appreciation, and that is Dinosaur. 

One of my earliest memories of going to the theater comes from May of 2000. For months, I had seen trailers for a new Disney movie about dinosaurs, simply called Dinosaur, and I was stoked. This wasn’t some Land Before Time little kid cartoon, this was the real deal: dinosaurs that looked as good as the ones out of Jurassic Park, but still talked like people. 

It felt like forever before I finally got to see it. I even remember bringing one of my dinosaur toys with me to the theater and playing with it before the movie started. I only remember two things clearly from that initial viewing: the theater was extremely loud, and that toy dino I brought fell into the cracks of my chair because I was so riveted by what was playing up on the screen.

Dinosaur is far from flawless. First of all, the plot isn’t really original. Aladar, a baby Iguanodon just getting ready to hatch, gets separated from his mother and dropped off on an island of lemurs, which raise him to adulthood, then a meteor impact destroys their home and makes them refugees. They join up with a herd of various dinosaurs, including more of Aladar’s own kind, and make an arduous journey to the “nesting grounds”. 

Re-watching it today, I am frequently annoyed by the stupid lemurs, and just wish the dinosaurs would stop talking and act more like dinosaurs and less like archetypal Disney characters. But, I am still just as entranced by the fantastic visuals and thrilling cinematic score as I was when I was a kid. The film is basically an updated version of the original Land Before Time (a connection I wouldn’t make for well over a decade) only without all the singing, which I really did not miss. And looking back on it, I didn’t care that the dinosaurs spoke. This was a fantasy movie, it wasn’t striving for realism, just entertainment. 

The prehistoric characters, like the plot, are pretty standard. The design team did a great job creating the look of the dinosaurs—they look realistic overall, but with some artistic flourishes here and there. One thing I was always curious about were the dinosaurs’ eyes. The Iguanodon that don’t speak have solid black eyes, while the speaking ones have the classic Disney eyes (big, round, you know the ones), and then there’s the issue of some dinos speaking and others just making grunts and squawks and roars and whatnot, why don’t they all speak? Can they all speak? It’s easy to overthink certain aspects of this movie, and easier yet to brush it off as “just a kid’s movie”. But, it actually isn’t. 

I recall my whole family coming out to see Dinosaur (mainly because of my own obsession with dinos), but it was like an event. It featured impressive-looking computer-generated dinos roaming around real-world locations—the film was shot in Hawaii and Venezuela, among other places—and unlike most fantasy-dinosaur movies, it verges on scientific accuracy. It isn’t explained, but dinosaur experts could infer the film takes place in the early Cretaceous period around modern-day South America. 

Unlike Land Before Time, which brought together a group of dinosaurs that never existed during the same time period, Dinosaur introduced audiences to, at that time, lesser known species like the egg-stealing Oviraptor (although it’s now known they weren’t primarily egg thieves) and the harrowing Carnotaurus (referred to as a “Carnotaur” in the film, also its size was exaggerated greatly) which filled the villain role typically occupied by T-rex or Allosaurus. It was a nice way of switching things up. 

One part that will always be a standout for me is the opening sequence. I used to put on my VHS tape of Dinosaur and turn the volume up as loud as it could go, just to watch the Carnotaurus burst out of the jungle and chase down the herd of dinosaurs, running and roaring. It was, and still is, a very intense scene, and I’m sure it had many little kids vacating their bowels in the theaters (but not me, of course). 

The sound design is excellent, and the visual effects, though not quite as good as Jurassic Park, still hold up pretty well to this day. While the aforementioned sequence is still incredible, it’s the one that follows that truly impresses and creates a sense of awe. A Pteranodon (A.K.A pterodactyl) scoops up the tiny egg containing our hero dino Aladar and carries him across the dramatic and breathtaking prehistoric landscape. This is one movie that seriously deserves a 3D re-release, just for this scene alone.

As a whole, Dinosaur may not pack quite the punch it had for me as a child, but the visual journey still remains supreme, plus an exhilarating score by James Newton Howard (something I couldn’t appreciate back then, but I certainly do now) makes for one huge nostalgia trip for me. If you haven’t seen Dinosaur, I’d say give it a watch, just don’t expect something quite on the level of Jurassic Park.