Any opf you guys seen Disney's Dinosaur. With Aladar the Iguanodon. I absolutely love it. The CG is amazing. I just wanna hug Aladar!! So opinions..... :wub:

I really like this movie as well. The idea of inserting CG dinosaurs over live action backgrounds was a great idea. It let them create a photorealistic world without having to render every last leaf in CG. I think the real backgrounds made the CG characters look more real as well because they're standing there in a real environment.

Though even the real backgrounds they used were processed in the computer quite a bit. Virtually every background shot you see in the movie is actually a composite of different backgrounds. The most frequent thing they did was to replace the sky that was in the original shot with something more appropriate for the scene. So if it happened to be a bit cloudy on the day they were shooting, they just replaced it with a nice blue sky later on. They similarly converted day shots into darkness for the night shots. And once they added all the shadows and reflections and other little elements (like the dust that gets kicked up when the dinosaurs walk or run), it really brings the whole thing to life. I thought the look of the film was just great.

The music throughout was really good as well. It really matched the mood of the movie. James Newton Howard always does great soundtracks. I had to go buy the CD. :)

It would have been nice though if the story was a bit stronger. As it was, the movie is pretty much a retake of "The Land Before Time" with dinosaurs losing their normal habitat and having to go off in search of the Great Valley and facing danger along the way. I think the movie would have done better when it was released if there was greater depth to the story or at least something to distance it more from "Land Before Time".

Still, I highly recommend this movie to anyone that likes creature-filled fantasy adventure movies. If you haven't seen it, by all means rent it.

Piece-o-trivia: Did you know that they created the Dinosaur ride at Disney's Animal Kingdom theme park long before the movie came out? They actually created the ride, which was originally called "Countdown to Extinction" before they had the script written for the movie. At the point they developed the ride, they only knew that the lead character was going to be an iguanodon, and that there was going to be a meteor impact during the movie. So that's basically the only connection between the movie and the ride. When the movie came out, they renamed the ride to be "Dinosaur" and added the life sized statue of Aladar in reflecting pool in front of the building. (The reflecting pool was always there, but it was just a pool previously.)

I wish they'd make more movies with CG creatures appearing in a real world environment. As I've mentioned before, I'd love to see the dragons from Dragon Booster rendered out in a photorealistic form and standing on a real world background. I think that would look ever so cool. :dance:

Ohhh!!!

I love that movie too!!! I love all dinosaur movies :P

It's really nice that movie, and it's on my fav. movie list.