Tim's Toons: A century of dinosaur movies
Thursday, June 11, 2015 at 11:01PM 
Tim here. Jurassic World opens this weekend, tapping into our unflagging cultural love of dinosaurs. How unflagging? In 2015, we celebrate the 101st anniversary of the first dinosaurs in the movies, in the form of Winsor McKay's animated Gertie the Dinosaur and D.W. Griffith's live-action Brute Force. The enormous prehistoric creatures have had a grip on filmmakers' imaginations ever since.
To celebrate that history, I present this short tour of four different animated movies about dinosaurs from across the ages, bearing witness to all the scientific and artistic evolution that went by in the course of dino-cinema’s first century. The tour is after the jump...
Gertie the Dinosaur (1914)
Not only did Winsor McKay pioneer the very idea of the dinosaur movie, he also beat Steven Spielberg to the bunch by 79 years in making one that's also a demonstration of state of the art technique. Gertie was the most detailed, complicated animation up to that point, with each of its laboriously hand-drawn frames (this was before the innovation of drawing backgrounds and characters separately - and these backgrounds were incredibly detailed for the era) carefully timed to mimic the movement of an organic being with a level of realism that had never been accomplished before. When McKay completed it in February, he incorporated it into his vaudeville show, interacting with Gertie and making her do tricks, though by the end of that year, he'd rework it into its current form, with a live-action framework comically demonstrating the animation process. The heart of the short remains Gertie herself, though, one of the great milestones in animating a personality that shows off a full range of emotions despite being a line drawing with zombiefied, dead eyes.
Fantasia:"Rite of Spring"(1940)
One of the more peculiar and dated sequences from Disney's bravura attempt to redefine American cartoons as high-brow art was this rebranding of Stravinksy's ballet as the score to a brief treatment of prehistory as late '30s science knew it. The details veer from passable popular science to wrong, wrong, wrong, but let’s not be dicks to paleontologists who’ve been dead for decades. Instead, let us appreciate this for what it is: an earnest attempt to capture the weight and mass of giant animals with the most care that Disney animation was capable of during its greatest artistic period. It’s intensely dramatic, from the battering music and the Sturm und Drang lighting as much as from the heftiness of the animated animals themselves, and whatever its failings as science, it’s exactly the kind of epic spectacle that the word "dinosaur" has long suggested to starry-eyed kids.
The Land Before Time (1988)
The advent of television was great for dinos in the living room, but there was a decades-long drought of the giant creatures on the big screen, in animation at least (they thrived in live-action matinee movies). It ended when Steven Spielberg (five years away from spiking the dinosaur craze to its all-time high) and George Lucas threw some money at former Disney animator Don Bluth to make a prehistoric adventure movie. The original concept, in which the dinosaurs never spoke, would have been more ambitious and almost certainly less popular; as it was, this film that reduced the cast to five generic '80s kids was enough of a hit to launch a direct-to-video sequel empire and serve as generational touchstone. At the risk of earning the internet's ill-will, I really don't think it holds up: the design is pretty but the jerky animation shows its lack of resources, and the script is pretty empty-headed. But it gets one thing incontestably right: its animalistic T-Rex villain is one of the great childhood nightmares made flesh of all the 1980s.
Dinosaur (2000)
A stillborn attempt to establish Disney's internal CGI division as a world-class visual effects house, this marriage of live-action backgrounds and computer-animated characters looks posh enough. Although, stranded between the worlds of realistic CGI and cartoons, it started showing its age pretty quickly. The storytelling is much worse: it's largely an retread of The Land Before Time with even more generic characters and infinitely less mythic & terrifying wordless carnivores, as well as lemurs. Modern-type lemurs. The science there is a little bit dodgy, but the real offense is that they're on hand mostly to be ghastly comic relief distracting from the film's only meaningful strength, its lovingly realized dinosaurs, in some ways the most accurate that had ever been seen in an otherwise frivolous popcorn movie to that point (it corrects Jurassic Park's grossly oversized velociraptors, for starters). But otherwise, this is easily the most disposable entry on this list.
Share your own favorite animated dinos in comments!
Reader Comments (7)
my favorite animated dinosaurs (unmentioned here probably because they're in live-action situations) were always the stop motion ones.
But Gertie is very cute.
Oh God, I loooooved The Land Before Time when it first came out. I don't think I saw any of the sequels because somehow I knew, even at that young age, that they just wouldn't be the same and I didn't want to dilute my love for the original.
The aren't a lot of things that bring me back to film studies classes as vividly as Gertie the Dinosaur.
I watched Gertie the Dinosaur on TCM last year when they showed a few Winsor McKay shorts. It was surprised by how well-developed Gertie was as a character. You really felt for her, and it reminded me of how well Pixar does this today. That short film earns its place in the National Film Registry, not only for its influence, but also for its entertainment value.
Very cool post. I'm really interested in seeing Gertie. That sounds great.
Does Fred Flintstone's pet count?
The Land Before Time, like all the Bluth toons, is really quite an ugly film, but I still have a warm place in my heart for it. The characters are oh-so-sweet and nothing makes me cry like the arrival of the gang in the Great Valley.