April 9, 2009
The Best Dinosaur Movie That Never Was
Looking back on it now, Disney’s 2000 film Dinosaur was pretty impressive. It melded CGI dinosaurs with real landscapes in a convincing way and generally looked good as a film. The problem was that the film execs felt that the dinosaurs needed to talk (except for all the “bad” dinosaurs) and this made the movie a bit of a chore to sit through. What most people don’t know, though, is that in its early stages of development Dinosaur had the potential to be one of the best dinosaur movies ever made.
Over at his VonShollyWood blog, artist Pete Von Sholly has shared some of the unused concept art he had created for Dinosaur during its early development. The illustrations are stunning, from a mosasaur gulping down a meal to a lemur trying to ride a Pachyrhinosaurus, but most of the drawings will not be familiar to those who saw the film. If Von Sholly’s concept art had been translated to the screen it may have resulted in a very different film, indeed.
And Von Sholly was not the only talented paleo-artist working on the picture. According to one of his posts;
Think about this: we had me (blush), Mark Hallet, Dave Krentz, Doug Henderson, Ricardo Delgado, Brian Franczak, Thom Enriquez, Bob Bakker, William Stout and a host of others working on this thing. Tell me that shouldn’t have added up to the ultimate dinosaur movie!
It is sad that the finished film did not do justice to the talent of the people behind it, and even sadder that no book of concept art was ever released in conjunction with the movie. I am sure any paleo fan would drool at the prospect of seeing the concept art for this film from some of the best dinosaur illustrators in the business. It is probably far too late to pull together such a volume now, but in case anyone over at Disney is listening, I know a lot of dinosaur fans who would be overjoyed to have such a volume produced.
[Hat-tip to Michael Ryan for first posting about Von Sholly's art]
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Reading through Von Sholly’s comments about what was used vs what wasn’t, it’s pretty obvious that the problem wasn’t talking dinosaurs, it was that they made a completely different movie.
What’s sad is that the trailer you posted (the first six or seven minutes of the movie) is the best part of the film. After that, the lemurs start talking and the dinosaurs start heading off the Great Valley and it just goes downhill.
However. I will say that, to this day, nobody has done a better CG Carnotaurus. If the movie succeeded in doing anything, it was accurately portraying my favorite carnivorous dinosaur.
I agree, a wonderful looking movie, it just became Disney-fied
. Lots of great scenes in it though.
I am a huge fan of Ricardo Delgado’s comics/graphic novels and his portrayal of dinosaurs without speech and only rudimentary anthropomorphism would have been a more appropriate model for such a film. Sadly, it wouldn’t have brought the kind of money that Disney wanted to shoot for.
I liked the Age of Reptiles series enough to even create an online text mud based on them!
The movie is yet to be made that really tells the tale of living in the age of dinosaurs, possibly flushing out George Gaylord Simpson’s time travel novel would give us another chance. The assertion that in two hundred years humans have come to understand everything that happened in the past half billion is a bit presumptuous don’t you think? Present day palontology is not just about adding footnotes to the previous generation’s accomplishments. Some of the greatest discoveries have yet to made. Right at this moment, there may be lying on some laboratory table, in a dusty half prepped condition, the type of discovery that will eventually transform the very definition of what it is to be human.