ollywood has a long tradition of animating dinosaur characters on film – most notably in early Willis O'Brien spectacles including The Lost World and King Kong, then later with Ray Harryhausen's numerous enhancements of O'Brien's pioneering stop motion techniques. However, when Jurassic Park came to screens seven summers ago, it divided time for moviegoers who wished for realistic prehistoric creatures who moved and reacted as we wanted them to – the way that we pictured the enormous beasts stomping across the young planet earth. Now, with Disney Studios' Dinosaur, cinema audiences will be treated to a new type of dinosaur animation to grace the screen – the film contains over 1300 individual visual effects shots, most of which involve a variety of dinosaur species interacting among live action landscapes.

To create the magic of the 84-minute Dinosaur, Disney first had to establish an entire digital facility — The Secret Lab — to develop the technology and house the 48 animators and additional staff required to realize the film over a five-year period. After original test footage of digitally animated dinosaurs was completed using scale-models for the background plates, Disney decided to move forward by using live-action background imagery in which they could place the computer-generated characters. Then, two separate film units visited locations which included Australia, Jordan, Venezuela, Samoa and Hawaii, Florida, and various Californian sites to shoot footage that comprised the background images for the finished feature film.

Over 18 months, the crews shot the complex plates, often using a 'Dino-Cam,' a sophisticated computer-controlled camera system which allowed the filmmakers to capture the needed precision in their shots. With Dino-Cam, the camera could move up and down 70 feet and pan 360 degrees. For a shot along the surface of a river in the opening sequence in the movie, the crew suspended the Dino-Cam between two 75-foot towers on a cable that allowed a 1000-foot span. As it speeds along just above the water, we encounter a variety of dinosaur characters along the way, but the image is fluid – it appears as though it were shot with a helicopter that was able to fly very low to the ground!

Virtually all of the shots were treated by the digital department in The Secret Lab in one form or another: in some frames of film, the sky color was simply altered, and in others, a dozen live-action elements from different locations were composited into one frame of film. Also, the digital team was tasked with making sure that the live-action footage blended perfectly with the CG-animated dinosaurs and lemurs – monkey characters who are key in the film – so they often were required to alter the live-action footage to 'fit' the CGI into the scene in a seamless manner.

Basically, the digital dinosaurs were created using the same technology as Jurassic Park's ILM creations. After extensive sketches, storyboards and tests were developed in the art department, Disney's key digital team members created wire frames and detailed skeletal understructures for the variety of dinosaurs who had to 'act' in the film. Perhaps what sets this Dinosaur apart from its predecessors is a sophisticated muscle and skin system which allowed the dinosaurs a greater range of motion than has been previously seen in a film. Moreover, since these dinosaurs had to talk, detailed head controls were developed: facial articulation included mouth, brow, eyes, nose, tongue, cheeks and jaws.

To maintain consistency in the film, specific dinosaur or lemur characters were typically assigned to one animator all the way through the film so that the person would get to understand his or her character better than anyone. Animators and technicians that reached 350 people labored on some 30 shots per week for two years to finalize all of their characters' animation. Digital effects supervisor Neil Eskuri said, "it was the little things to add to a shot to get that believability in the characters. If we didn't do that, the audience would sense that something was missing." Overseeing the whole operation was producer Pam Marsden and co-directors Ralph Zondag and Eric Leighton, who had worked on Disney's The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Certainly, in the classic Disney animated tradition, the story of Dinosaur is geared towards a family audience, though it does not hold bac k from showing the dangers of extinction and Darwin's basic "survival of the fittest" theories. Set in the Cretaceous period, the film has a hero, of course — an Iguanodon dinosaur named Aladar (voiced by D.B. Sweeney). At the very beginning of the opening credit sequence, Aladar comes into view even before he is born – we see him first in an egg when he is cut off from his nest by a Tyrannosaurus-like Carnotaur, a horned behemoth who re-enters the story later. The orphaned Aladar egg travels on a wondrous journey in which a variety of dinosaur species encounter him – many want the egg but can't seem to hold onto it. When Aladar finally settles, he hatches and is raised by a family of kind lemurs who live peacefully on an island.

Then, in the story's most intense sequence, a grown Aladar and his adopted family face an unexpected challenge – a giant meteor strikes the earth not far from their island. Ironically, Disney first called the entire fi lm Countdown to Extinction and ended the film on this note, but producer Pam Marsden noted that research indicates that dinosaurs lived for 150,000 years past the theorized comet that hit earth and wiped out all of the dinosaurs. Executed with live-action explosions and other elements, the dinosaur and lemur flee the coming catastrophe, but their island is destroyed and they must seek other living grounds.

Many other additional dinosaur species are introduced when Aladar and his "family" find a huge herd of others looking for a new feeding area. Neera (voiced by Julianne Margulies from television's ER) is the first other Iguanodon who Aladar has seen in his life, and the two strike up a courtship to the dismay of Kron, the leader of the herd and Neera's brother. Since he is shoved aside by Kron, Aladar and the lemurs join other outcasts in the herd, including the enormous but gentle Brachiosaur, Baylene (played Joan Plowright), a Styrachosaur, Eema (Della Reese), and Url, a silent Anklysaur. Though they are older dinosaurs, Baylene (who measures 120-feet long and carries 100-tons of weight) and Eema help Aladar acclimate to their ways, speaking of a legendary nesting ground that they are trying to reach.

Along the way, the herd must contend with obstacles that include a changing environment – supposedly due to the oncoming meteors that have started hitting earth regularly – and the two predatory Carnotaurs who are following. In several separate scenes, Aladar's leadership in the face of the Carnotaur attacks is the strongest element in the film. Specific credit must be given to Atsushi Sato who supervised the animation of the Carnotaurs, making them into powerfully engaging and scary predators – in some shots, even more so than the T-Rex from the Jurassic Park films.

Most of the conceptualizations of the Carnotaurs and other predators attacking the smaller dinosaurs are completely convincing. It is a tribute to the artistry of Disney's production team that all of the dinosaurs – even the ones who speak and have facial characteristics more akin to people – perform in a believable manner. The film never becomes cute, and the outcasted characters who must band together to survive all maintain a formidable presence in the film. Even the background characters, who neither key a performance nor speak, always appear to be interacting with other dinosaurs and the landscapes just as cleanly as the hero characters.

Also, with the classic Disney stamp of filmmaking, Dinosaur retains incredible production values throughout – the sounds, images, and dynamics on screen are on a par with the best recent 2-D animated Disney films. One can hope that in addition to providing effects for other films, The Secret Lab will continue to generate its own projects. Without a doubt, Dinosaur's amazing technical and aesthetic achievements have set new standards for filmmaking. Anyone wishing to become engrossed in the breakthroughs provided by the film's countless effects will surely be thoroughly entertained. Of course, so will fans who are intrigued by projects that bring viewers who have a long-standing interest in dinosaurs through the elements classic storytelling.

It seems that the moviegoing public never tires of dinosaurs, and this film (plus the excellent recent BBC special, Walking with Dinosaurs) should re-energize interest in the subject matter as Jurassic Park did in 1993. What's more, on July 18, 2001, Universal Studios will release Jurassic Park 3, the second sequel to Steven Spielberg's pioneering dinosaur project. As directed by former ILM art director and accomplished director Joe Johnston and designed by Ed Verreaux (production designer of Mission to Mars and Contact), Jurassic Park 3 is sure to offer many new visual surprises. Among them, the unveiling of a new predator, the Spinosaurus, is sure to continue cinematic dinosaur thrills for audiences. Until then, Disney's Dinosaur film, with its perfect blend of CG dinosaur animation and realistic environments, is the standard by which all other dinosaur-themed entertainment will be judged.

Dinosaur was released on video and DVD on January 30. For more information, link to www.dinosaur.com.

Freelance author Scott Essman has been writing about cinema craftsmanship since 1995. Contact him at scottessman@yahoo.com.