The Jurassic Period Returns to Earth
The Jurassic period has returned to Earth. It started with Spielberg’s film, igniting a dinosaur fever. Now, it’s in full bloom: our world is visited by herds of natural lizards in the sensational BBC documentary series and the tailed stars of the new Disney film “Dinosaur.” In its opening weekend in the US, the $200 million blockbuster recouped a fifth of its costs.
Let’s forget about rubber toys and temporary tattoos for teenagers. This is more serious: we stand before the possibility of reconstructing bygone eras. Movie screens are slowly but surely becoming a second reality. Joining forces with digital technology, fluffy cartoons are transforming into time machines. It’s possible to resurrect deceased stars and assign them new roles (I’ve already mentioned the long-term contract recently “signed” by Marlene Dietrich). Or, one can witness the dawn of life on Earth – as in the British television series “Walking with Dinosaurs,” which was recently shown in Russia. Interest in this journey through the ages exceeded expectations: the Discovery Channel, where the film first aired, attracted nearly 11 million viewers – a record for documentary cinema. “Dinosaur,” the firstborn of Disney’s new digital studio, directed by Ralph Zondag and Eric Leighton, marked the beginning of a new era in film: a long-extinct world recreated based on strict scientific data, where its inhabitants can, like actors, play out any scenario.
When experiencing the adventures of Bambi, we understood it was just a drawing. Animation was associated with the figure of the artist. Even Pixar’s recent hits, “Toy Story” and “A Bug’s Life,” remain within the realm of the drawn world. In Disney’s “Dinosaur,” only the precise knowledge that the Jurassic period is long gone reminds us of the virtuality of each photographically convincing image. As in the English television series, computer-modeled primeval lizards are placed in a realistically filmed environment. But unlike “Walking with Dinosaurs,” this is a dramatic story with a plot, where you empathize with the hero’s fate, the characters are endowed with personalities and the gift of speech, and the film itself presents a moral lesson traditional for Disney cartoons.
The 75-minute film took 12 years to make and cost around $200 million – making it the most expensive film of all time in terms of screen time per minute. Its release once again puts the Disney empire in the absolute lead of global animation – now in 3D format. And the film’s commercial success came just in time to restore Disney’s reputation after the failure of “Mission to Mars.”
The Plot
The plot is typical of a heartwarming Disney melodrama. Just as the iguanodon Aladar is about to hatch, a cunning flying lizard steals the egg and carries it, like a fox, through dark forests. This journey – an aerial bobsled ride over jungles and a swim in the turbulent waters of a prehistoric river teeming with monsters – opens the film and sets the pace for a computer-generated flight, as real as James Bond’s chases: your heart races as you plunge into the canyons. (Filmed over the real landscapes of Colorado, Florida, Australia, Venezuela, and Samoa. These landscapes were then broken down into details in the computer: the sky separately, branches and trees separately. Then, from the details, unseen landscapes were reassembled, landscapes that no longer exist on Earth).
Having successfully survived the dangerous flight in the egg, Aladar finds a new family – lemurs, where he is successfully born and raised in the manner of Tarzan. The monkeys raise him in their traditions – teaching him to be sociable, to live in a friendly company, to get along with everyone, and to sympathize with those in trouble. And everything is going well, but then, as in “Bambi,” a natural disaster intervenes. In “Bambi,” it was a fire; here, it’s a meteor shower, which, according to assumptions, brought the reign of the dinosaurs to an end. Everyone flees in search of salvation, disconsolate herds of dinosaurs wander in search of their native nesting grounds. Against the backdrop of universal cataclysms, the love of young Aladar and the slender iguanodon Neera blossoms.
Scenes generated in the computer alternate with episodes filmed in reality – it’s impossible to notice the difference. If a fictional dinosaur falls into the water, real splashes fly. Drawn monsters raise real dust on primeval paths. Every movement of the animals on the screen is based on precise calculation. The authors create not a drawing, but a virtual creature. The skeleton of the lizards is modeled on the computer, then, according to all the norms of anatomy, it is supplied with musculature, dressed in skin, and now every fold of it is moved not by the will of the artist, but by the law of nature. The animator only sets the key phases he needs – everything else is done by the character, whose life activity, like a genetic code, is embedded in the computer. The authors attached particular importance to the photorealism of the image. The studio had its own specialists in skin, tails, and fur. The lemurs alone have more than a million hairs each – the swaying of each is carefully planned by the “fur artist.”
The Making Of
Walon Green’s script was written for Paul Verhoeven, who was planning an action film in the spirit of “Starship Troopers.” Then the plans changed, playwrights John Harrison and Robert Nelson Jacobs got involved – and now the film reveals motifs from “The Lion King,” “Tarzan,” and even “Red River,” the 1948 western with John Wayne (his character is reminiscent of the dinosaur leader, the despot Kron).
The history of the film’s creation is intertwined with the history of the new Disney studio, which was named “The Secret Lab.” Built in a hangar of an abandoned airport, it is to become the main scientific and practical center of the new cinema. Its initial principle is the rejection of drawn landscapes and backgrounds. Its main achievement is the immersion of computer creations in a real environment. Between these two points lies years of research work. Neither its duration nor its result could be predicted by anyone. There were no specialists in the new field – they were forged on the go.
The film itself became a training ground, its plot changing as new opportunities arose. In the name of fabulousness, scientific allowances were introduced: in order to speak, the lizards had to acquire lips. When a commercial with English-speaking dinosaurs hit the Internet, zealots of scientific accuracy flooded the studio with indignant letters. Gradually, the meaning of the film emerged: the extinct dinosaurs as an image of our society, which could just as easily disappear from the face of the Earth one day.
VIP
Dinosaurs. Reptiles of the Mesozoic era. The largest reached 25 meters. Both films – both documentary and fairy tale – destroy the idea of them as slow giants who died either from meteorites or from their own clumsiness. Both are based on the latest discoveries and paleontological finds, which are becoming increasingly sensational. In Mongolia, voids have been found in the sands, which, like volcanic ash in Pompeii, have preserved the outlines of monsters that disappeared 80 million years ago in all details. It turned out that the dinosaurs carefully lined their nests with plants so that their heat, generated during decomposition, would warm the pets like an incubator. A nesting site has been discovered where a dinosaur lay on a clutch of eggs with pathetically outstretched paws – the dying parent was trying to warm the cubs with its breath and save them from death. The latest methods of scanning prehistoric skulls have made it possible to reliably generate the sounds with which the monsters shook the primeval air (these sounds are abundantly presented in the BBC series “Walking with Dinosaurs”). The discovered cemeteries of lizards destroyed the idea of a purely individual way of life – it turned out that they had their own family values and even a system of raising young animals. Moreover, scientists are coming to the conclusion that dinosaurs have not died out at all, but have evolved. Bipeds, for example, acquired feathers and became birds.
By the end of the 20th century, the world was gripped by a real dinosaur mania. In large cities, enlightened children today have a much better idea of Tyrannosaurus Rex than of an ordinary cow.