Dinosaurs and computers seem to go together these days. After all, it was Steven Spielberg's spectacular, digitally-created T-Rex in Jurassic Park which really kickstarted the dino-boom of the 1990s, and the BBC's Walking with Dinosaurs that has kept the fascination going into the 21st century. Young viewers in particular appear endlessly obsessed with the ultra-realistic recreations of dinosaurs which digital technology makes possible. Reports this week of the demise of Dublin's IMAX cinema made the point that one film, T-Rex, had been showing there for two years. It didn't save IMAX, but clearly dinosaurs were the only thing which kept the cinema open so long.
As Hollywood's pre-eminent creator of animation and fantasy, the Walt Disney Corporation has taken its time jumping on the dinowagon, but Dinosaur, its latest animated blockbuster, has already redressed the balance, proving a huge hit in the US. In fact, it's not quite accurate to describe Dinosaur as an animated movie, with its mix of digitally-created action set against live-action backdrops (shot in locations around the world from Hawaii to Venezuela). The results are quite spectacular, particularly the bravura opening sequence which also functions as the movie's trailer. The dinosaurs don't sing or dance in the new movie, but they do talk, so they represent a sort of half-way house between the cuddly anthropomorphism of most Disney creatures (represented, rather anachronistically, by a supporting cast of lemurs), and the rampaging monsters of Jurassic Park. "The challenge was in marrying a high level of realism with creating sympathetic characters who talked," says co-director Ralph Zondag, a classical animator who spent several years in Dublin with the now-defunct Sullivan Bluth studios. Producer Pam Marsden describes the competing demands of realism and characterisation as "a box within which we had to work".
Constructed along the lines of classic Westerns such as Red River, the movie tells the story of a young iguanodon, Aladar, who embarks on a wagon-train-style trek with a herd of dinosaurs across the desert in search of a promised land. There are some spectacular set pieces, including a natural catastrophe when a meteor hits the earth, foreshadowing the extinction of the movie's main characters.
Which is one of the problems, of course, about making dinosaurs cuddly, non-tragic and child-friendly. At one point, it was envisaged that Dinosaur would be directed by Paul Verhoeven (Robocop, Basic Instinct) from a script by Walon Green (The Wild Bunch). One could hazard a guess that such a production team would have turned out a rather more gory, dark movie than Disney's, but certain elements remain, particularly the Western-infuenced storyline. Of course, dinosaurs do have something in common with the Wild Bunch - they all die in the end - and that's the way the original Dinosaur script ended. But when the project was re-envisaged as an animated Disney movie, a happier ending, not surprisingly, was devised, and the body count was reduced significantly.
"We were told that this was a Disney movie. There would be no ripping and tearing of body parts," says digital effects supervisor, Neil Eskuri. "There is some violence on the screen, and there is some blood, but you'd barely see it. But you have to have some of it, because that's what kids want to see dinosaurs doing."
Dinosaur is not just a single movie - it represents the first fruits of Disney's investment in the development of a new, computer-generated animation and effects studio. "We have had digital elements in our classically animated features, going all the way back to the 1980s, in films like The Great Mouse Detective," says Thomas Schumacher, the company's president of Feature Animation. "We didn't have the artists or the technicians or the software, so we had to start nearly from scratch," says Eskuri, who admits Disney was a little late in starting its own digital studio.
The Walt Disney Corporation has reaped lucrative dividends from its relationship with the world's most admired and commercially successful digital animators, Pixar, who have had huge hits with the two Toy Story films and A Bug's Life, while continually expanding the possibilities of the digital medium.
"Ironically, despite our very close relationship with John Lasseter (Pixar's charismatic boss), we were always going to go this way. This is all a logical consequence of the work we did in Tarzan, or equally significant elements we'll have in Treasure Planet, which is coming out in two years. One of the reasons we are going for such a high level of versimilitude is that John is covering the more cartoonish stuff so well," says Schumacher. The same technology developed for Dinosaur is being used to create the puppies for Disney's big Thanksgiving release, 102 Dalmatians. "Disney now has its own CGI studio which can produce animated movies, as well as acting as an effects shop for other, live action movies," says Schumacher.
"In a way, we were all on a level playing field," says Marsden. "Because none of us had ever done anything like this before, digital experts didn't want to come to work with Disney. They were happy doing explosions and effects in live-action and weren't interested in coming to work in animation. Also, this was set up at first as a collaboration between the live-action and animation departments."
The blending of live-action and animation is one of the more intriguing elements of the movie. Back in 1994, Disney's first concept was to make the film with digitally animated dinosaurs on studio sets. But early in production, it became apparent that the sets just looked too artificial to match the CGI action, so the decision was taken to shoot the backgrounds at real locations. "You have to remember that six years ago, when we started this, Toy Story hadn't even come out," says Marsden. "So we didn't know if we could create realistic dinosaurs who could act. We spent 15 months doing tests, working on a couple of scenes to see what was possible, before getting the go-ahead." She agrees that, with the advances in creating digital backgrounds since then (most notably in Pixar's A Bug's Life), the live action element would be less necessary now.
For those of us who find the songs the least appealing part of the Disney experience, the good news is there are no sugary Tim Rice or Phil Collins concoctions to be found in Dinosaur. "Well, they just wouldn't work," says Schumacher. "The level of reality in the characters just wouldn't allow us to have them bursting into song."
It's no surprise that plenty of liberties are still taken with natural history. The animators pondered long and hard before settling on iguanodons as their main characters. "The iguanodon looked a little more accessible, because it looks like a horse," says Zondag. "So we can play with those ideas of nobility and courage which people associate with that." With such bulky, inexpressive heroes, there wasn't much scope for emotional breadth in the performances, so the horsiness was emphasised as heavily as possible, he admits.
The painfully long production process involved in making something like Dinosaur risks throwing up subjects and settings which are out-of-date by the time the film hits the screen. Back in the early-to-mid 1990s, when the movie began production, dino fever seemed at its peak, with the release of Jurassic Park and the ensuing craze for all things large and scaly. But Marsden claims never to have doubted that there would still be an audience for the film when it finally came out. "That fascination with dinosaurs has never gone away," she says. "And if you look at the huge success of something like the Walking with Dinosaurs TV series last year, you can see that's true. OK, it does seem to surge, then go away for a while, but then it comes back again as strong as ever. We've experienced a surge, and I'm sure that will happen again when Jurassic Park 3 comes out."
Dinosaur goes on general release next Friday