Note: Due to the fact that the rest of the films covered in this series are more traditional in structure than the two previous films, the format of these articles will be slightly different from now on.

Like many others in my age group, I grew up partially on Disney VHS tapes. I have fond memories of most of them: Pocahontas was a favorite of mine and my sisters' before we knew anything about the real story, The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (whose title I feel obligated to type in its entirety due to its 2011 sequel being titled Winnie the Pooh) could always be relied on for sick days or times when we needed cheering up, and The Jungle Book...well, it was cute and my mom was nostalgic for it. One of the only movies we had that I don't think left any impact on me when I saw it as a child was Dinosaur, Walt Disney Animation Studios' first entirely computer-animated film. It looked nice, and I can't recall ever despising it, but I hardly remembered anything about the movie, even after rewatching it as a teenager. That wasn't a good sign, seeing as I've always had an excellent memory, even for mundane details of stories or events. Nevertheless, I tried to keep an open mind while revisiting it for this series.

Background

Dinosaur was originally conceived as a stop-motion film, similarly titled Dinosaurs. It was intended to be much darker in tone than any other feature created by the studio at the time, or even since, originally ending with the disaster that led to the species' extinction. It's not hard to see why Disney would be reluctant to slap a PG rating on that and send it out. It would not have included any dialogue, which was also the initial plan for Don Bluth's hand-drawn film The Land Before Time, released in 1988. Michael Eisner wouldn't have that, however, believing it would hurt the film financially. The project was shelved for several years until 1995, when a film produced by a newer animation studio was released by Disney to massive critical and commercial success. This small project that has since become lost to time (just kidding, it's Toy Story) pioneered the use of computer animation for an entire feature film, and the script just happened to be a comedy that appealed to both children and adults - but children most importantly. Eisner got dollar signs in his eyes and decided WDAS should rewrite the script to make it more lighthearted in tone and use CGI instead of stop-motion. Thus, production on what he saw as a certain box office hit was underway. Unfortunately, though, it was not to be. The script did little to impress critics or audiences, and, although it enjoyed mild financial success, the film was hardly the juggernaut Disney was hoping for.

Positives

Despite computer animation still being a sort of primitive medium in the late 90s when production was underway, the character designs and animation are, for the most part, impressive. The action takes place against live-action backgrounds that the characters blend into pretty seamlessly, and the environments are truly beautiful to look at. Several scenes have color palettes that are both appealing and in keeping with the tone of whatever is happening onscreen; you'll notice this right away, as the first shot uses some nice earthy tones that enhance the film's realistic visual style. Dinosaur opens strong, with a sequence following an egg being passed off to different species of dinosaur that steal it, try to eat it, or may not even notice they've crossed paths with it. James Newton Howard's score swells throughout the scene and remains strong through the entire movie, being matched by visuals that typically range from decent to astounding.

Some elements from the film's original concept seem to remain: the opening scene is completely void of dialogue - which, seeing how this was used as the original trailer for the film, may have been confusing to audiences at the time. There are also several scenes throughout that are downright brutal. In the first act, the lemur habitat (and no, lemurs never lived alongside dinosaurs) that the lead character, Aladar, had grown up in is destroyed in a meteor shower that kills all of the inhabitants except for him and his closest adoptive family. Later, after the main characters have joined a herd of dinosaurs headed for a new home, Aladar's idealism is constantly challenged - primarily by the antagonist, Kron, but we'll get to him in a bit. The hard truths that this subplot sets out to convey really shine through when he's forced purely by circumstance to accept that he can't help or save everyone. One part that was particularly disturbing is when Aladar passes by another dinosaur who has seemingly fainted or died from exhaustion. Up to this point, he has held firm that the herd can still reach their destination without sacrificing lives, but now he finds himself with no choice but to keep moving, and the abandoned dinosaur's body is later eaten by scavengers.

Aladar's naive optimism hurts him in some respects, but it also makes for some good morals for the audience. Through his interactions with two elderly female dinosaurs, who have trouble keeping up with the rest of their group, the film stresses the importance of showing compassion to those who are weaker. Kron states at one point that only those who are strong or fast enough to survive on their own "deserve to live," a mindset that makes him a slightly more disturbing villain since there are a surprising number of people who truly believe something like this. A tougher lesson that the movie tries to teach is that things don't always go the way you want them to, even if you try your hardest to make them. None of the characters do anything to deserve having their homes destroyed, but it happens and kills many more innocents, even if they were unnamed extras. Aladar does all he can to save the life of another dinosaur who sacrifices himself for the group, but it doesn't keep the latter character from dying. It's moments like these where you can see a darker movie trying to get out.

Negatives

For all of Dinosaur's good messages and serious moments, the characters aren't nearly developed enough for the viewer to care that much about what happens to them. Aladar is hardly detestable, but there's nothing interesting about him. His only real character trait is that he's nice. There was some potential to explore him adapting to being around his own species for the first time, but that gets pushed aside in favor of his conflicts with Kron and romantic arc (if you can even call it that) with Kron's sister, Neera. Ultimately, there's no point to him even having been raised by a different species. The only issue brought up is him having to deal with the leader of this specific group of dinosaurs, which is really just differences in viewpoints between them.

His love interest is equally bland, if not more so. Any development of her relationship with Aladar is mostly awkward smiles and him telling her that helping people is good, while leaving them to die is generally bad. She immediately accepts this despite it being the exact opposite of her brother's point of view, which she seemed to agree with to some extent up to this point, but we know nothing about their upbringing, so maybe Kron was rebelling against their parents or fell in with the wrong crowd at some point. I have no idea. The only way I even know they're siblings because Neera says it upfront the first time she's introduced. The two barely interact and don't really have much of a connection to each other. She's upset when he dies toward the end of the film, but even then, she doesn't seem as distraught as most people would be after losing someone they had presumably grown up with. There's no impact because we don't feel any kind of familial bond between the two. Some attempts are made at writing Kron as a more complicated villain, with him clearly having doubts about the way he leads the herd, but ultimately choosing to be cruel, to the point of deliberately putting children in danger (no guys, that's not on the nose at all, you're doing great). But again, we know very little about him, and he seems to make these choices for no real reason. At times they don't even seem to benefit him in any way, he just does these things because the movie needs a villain, even though we already have the smaller dinosaurs that are constantly stalking the herd and eating whoever they can catch.

I did find a few characters in this movie to be somewhat likable. Aladar's adoptive grandfather has some decent moments, being rough around the edges, but still caring for his family. The two old lady dinosaurs the main characters befriend have a nice dynamic with each other, being established as old friends, looking out for and supporting each other throughout the film. Theirs is the only relationship I cared about or found to be believable at all.

And I'll just say it: they read like an old married lesbian couple. If you're ever compelled to watch this movie for any reason, I dare you to challenge me on this.

When the movie isn't trying to be serious, it's even harder to watch than when characters are killed off. Like I said, there are one or two cute moments with the grandfather, but the rest of the comedy is pandering and poorly written. Aladar's best friend in the film, a lemur named Zini, is far and away the worst character, mostly because there's no reason for him to even be there. He exists only because animated kids' movies almost always have comedic sidekicks. But what separates Zini from, say, Genie, is that he serves no purpose to the plot. He has no effect on any major points in the film and is only there to make bad monkey jokes. In Aladdin, Genie was constantly helping the titular character and developed a strong friendship with him. He also had the motivation of wanting to be free from a life of servitude to human masters. Zini becomes friends with Aladar before the events of Dinosaur, and his only motivation, which is barely discussed and has no connection to any other plotlines, is to find a mate. This is resolved at the end by having several female lemurs appear out of nowhere and fawn over him. None of them have lines, names, or any semblance of personality, they just show up for a few seconds to conclude a subplot that no one really cared about, but that needed a payoff so the narrative wouldn't have any loose ends. The rest of the jokes aren't necessarily horrible, but nothing stands out about them. There are a couple of pee jokes, some anachronisms, jokes about gender differences, and an "I Spy" joke that would later reappear in Brother Bear. Like many other elements of the film, the humor is just unmemorable.

Final Thoughts

This movie was trying to capture the grand scale and emotion of films like The Lion King and Tarzan, but failed to pull it off. Its main character has nothing interesting or identifiable about him; a potential arc was introduced in the beginning of the film, but it's never explored or resolved. A coming-of-age story doesn't work if the character doesn't grow or change, which Aladar never does. It's hard to tell if he even learned anything. Ostensibly, the moral of the story is that we can only hope to be remembered in some way after we're gone, which is stated out of nowhere by a narrator at the very end of the movie, but none of the events leading up to it have any connection to that lesson. And that's a perfect way to sum up the entire script: disconnected. It tries to introduce complex characters, but none of them have any real development or personalities. They're just old character tropes with hardly anything added to make it feel fresh. The comedy doesn't mesh with the other story elements, and at times feels out of place. It would have been interesting to see this movie without dialogue as it was originally intended, to see emotions and communication between characters conveyed only through gestures and expressions. After all, this device was successful in WALL･E and in Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, although both included dialogue from supporting characters, and the latter had narration throughout (which was also part of the original concept for Dinosaur).

Sadly, I think the closest we'll ever get to the original vision of this filmis the "Rite of Spring" segment from Fantasia. The final product here feels more like a mediocre half-hour film you would see at a museum. It's not terrible, it's just nothing special, and that, in my opinion, is a tragedy.