I loved this movie as a kid, so I decided to check it out for the first time in many years. Besides the nostalgia rush, here's my thoughts as well as a few things I noticed for the first time:
Dinosaur is one of the weirdest, most tonally inconsistent movies in Disney's filmography. On one hand, they're trying to play it safe with the talking animals, comic relief lemurs (which were nowhere near close to evolving at the time of the dinosaurs), and common character archetypes such as the stubborn leaders, bland female love interest, and naïve but determined hero. On the other hand, they're also trying to give it a realistic nature documentary asthetic. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the filmmakers were inspired by the superb 1999 BBC series Walking With Dinosaurs. The film uses CG animals against live action locations just like the miniseries. Predators hunt, kill, and eat their prey and the violence is about as realistic as you can get with a PG rating. Walking With Dinosaurs was able to get away with taking it a step further and showing actual gore since it was touted as a nature documentary and not a family film. Perhaps this mashup was intentional. The film's major theme is that everyone thrives when we stick together, look out for one another, and utilize our different strengths. Those who believe in the survival of the fittest at one point or another wind up isolated and eventually eaten. Kron is depicted as a jerk, but of all the talking dinosaurs his behavior is closest to a real animal. There's a good scene between Plio and Bruton in the cave discussing this topic.
The first five minutes of the film are 10/10 material. With no dialogue, the opening has so much atmosphere and charm. Had the storytelling been entirely visual, this could have been a genuinely great film. Once those stupid lemurs start talking, the movie instantly plummets from a 10 to a 3. Upon rewatch as an adult, that whole lemur courtship sequence and "hot stuff" nonsense made me physically cringe. Once the meteor strikes the film bumps up to a 6 and stays pretty consistent throughout. I appreciate genuine peril and suspense in a kids' movie, and Dinosaur's use of predators as primary antagonists is simple but effective. The Carnotaurs have an awesome and scary design. You can tell they really wanted a T-Rex, but didn't want to rip off Jurassic Park, so they simply took a Carnotaurus and made it twice as long and with a beefier build. Even still, the devilish horns over its eyes and ridged, scaly bodies haunted my nightmares more than any other therapod.
When you revisit films from your youth, you're bound to find logical flaws you never noticed before, and Dinosaur is no exception. A small gripe is why Aladar didn't instruct Baleen to make more water when the thirsty herd charged in to drink from that one puddle. It would've been easier to just make more of those puddles with her giant feet than to put those dinosaurs in a single file line. Another big gripe is when Aladar goes to the former passage to the nesting grounds. He and his group of stragglers make it to the nesting grounds though the cave, and find that the old way has been blocked by fallen rocks. Aladar then turns around and goes back through the cave. When he gets out he turns RIGHT, the OPPISITE direction the herd was going in the first place. Aladar is such a flawless blank slate of a character, I would have loved a deleted scene where like 20 minutes later he stumbles across the dry lake they passed earlier. That would have been funny. Well, funnier than Zini.
I have no problem with the standoff scene itself since herding together and intimidating predators is a real defense mechanism real herding animals use. What I do question is how Aladar knew to do that. Is it instinct or learned? In either case they never establish it. I wish the film was longer so it could build a stronger relationship between our speaking characters and show more buildup of the predators to make them even more threatening. At 82 minutes with credits, the film FEELS short, like they could have added another 15 minutes to the runtime without it affecting the pacing one bit.
On a story level, there's some cliches like the villain falling to their death, but I think the biggest problem is no one has an arc. Our hero is the same at the end as the beginning. Most of the characters don't really learn anything. The only character who grows or changes is Bruton. Possibly Nera too, since Aladar's influence on her may have made her more sympathetic toward the baby iguanodon pair. And let's not forget the seminal Zini arc, where at the beginning he can't get a mate but at the end he happens to get bestowed with a harem of females. Yar may be a grandpa but are you sure you wouldn't take him instead? At least he doesn't single-handedly drag this movie's score down an entire point.
Reviewers on this site seem split between thinking the animation is good or bad. For the most part, I think it's great. The animators were able to make realistic looking dinosaurs while at the same time giving them facial expressions and emotions. They integrate the dinosaurs into the real-world environments very well, going so far as to add subtle touches like the log bouncing slightly as the oviraptor runs across it, or practical sand moving with an iguanodon's feet. This movie came out 15 years before the Jurassic World movies and still look better. My only complaint in this department is that there's a lot of repeated character models in the herd. I understand this in the wide shots, but I vividly recall one close up shot in the standoff scene with the same three identical iguanodons. Another topic that seems to come up is how some dinosaurs talk and others don't. I like how the predators don't talk, as it makes them harder to read and thus more frightening. They aren't necessarily villains, but rather a force of nature, animals that need to survive. Url the Ankylosaur is a weird one though, as he acts like a dog. Some reviewers are forgiving of this, but this always seemed weird to me.
This type of film comes along every 15 years or so: someone wants to make a dinosaur movie where none of the characters talk, but the studios force them to make them speak anyway. It happened with this film, it happened with Walking With Dinosaurs 3D, and I'm pretty sure The Land Before Time and Yhe Good Dinosaur as well. I'd love a movie like that. One that takes its time with atmosphere and visual storytelling. It's not so much a flaw as it is missed opportunity, and most of my complaints with Dinosaur are opportunity-based. The dinosaur bones are there, but there's no meat on them.
Dinosaur is a well shot film with an excellent score, great effects for the time, good voice acting, and a genuine sense of peril bogged down by out-of-place corny dialogue and comedic relief (mostly from one lemur) and a cliché-ridden script. I still enjoyed it all these years later if it appeals to you at all, you'll probably like it too. Objectively it's a 5 but my nostalgia bumps it up to a 7.
