Fun with dinosaurs - Mary L. Stanley - Hillsborough, NC USA
This is one of my favorite Disney movies. It's one of those movies that can be enjoyed by adults as well as kids. My 4-year-old granddaughter loves it.
Disney's Dinosaur - Holly S. Kohler -
Great movie for the Diosaur lover in all of us...no matter what our age!Dinosaur
It had the opportunity to be a great film, and it was wasted - Eric S. Kim - Southern California
Back in the year 2000, Disney released a CGI-animated film simply entitled Dinosaur. Costing over a hundred million dollars to make, it combined real-life settings (Venezuela) with computer-animated characters (dinosaurs). There were no cavemen involved, only the reptiles. The trailers for this film led us to believe that this would be a groundbreaking achievement in computer animation. Well, the CGI looks great, but the film itself is a bit of a disappointment.
But first, we've got to talk about the look and feel of this film. I have to admit that the CGI dinosaurs look fabulous. Every single character is extraordinarily detailed. The meteor sequence looks disturbingly beautiful. The special effects really do look amazing. Add in some fine cinematography and a mesmerizingly haunting music score, and you've got a great-looking film. So what's so disappointing about Dinosaur? If you've seen The Land Before Time, then you'll see some similarities. Several elements of the plot have been borrowed from Don Bluth's 2D-animated film, such as the search for a piece of land that has been untouched by a cataclysmic disaster. We've seen this sort of story before in many other movies. Then, there's the moral lesson of not giving up and cooperating with each other to avoid a more personal catastrophe. There is very little originality in this plot. Even a line of dialogue from The Lion King ("Lions eat guys like us!") has been borrowed. Next is the film's unsatisfactory screenplay. I don't think I have ever heard such preachy, and cutesy, dialogue before in a Disney film (whether animated or live-action). I know this is supposed to be a family film, but the characters all sound like they're either teachers or students. I mean, the themes this film focuses on are always analyzed, which ruins the overall movie experience. Lines such as "it's your choice, not your fate" can be easy evidence of this. And I also have to mention that the dialogue can also be juvenile at times? This isn't Sesame Street, and it shouldn't sound like it's from Sesame Street. Adults should be immersed in this, too. There are, unfortunately, other flaws: formulaic comedic sidekicks, clichéd antagonists, and the sentimental happy ending make the film it worse.
Disney could have done a much better job with Dinosaur. It could have had a solid story, solid writing, complex characters, and a much better tone. What we've got instead is a case of style-over-substance. Now, I will admit that I admire the look and feel of the film. The CGI animation, the music, and the cinematography are the things that keep me from grading this movie lower than a C-. Unfortunately, everything else keep me from grading this higher than an A-. Dinosaur deserves a C, and it could have been so much better.
Grade: C
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