Dinosaur is the latest Disney animation movie. Another movie which yet again pushes the boundaries of computer generated animation. Dinosaur uses real filmed footage of terrain, overlayed with computer animated creatures and special effects. Elements like shifting rocks from the passage of a large dinosaur or splashing water blend smoothly with the dinosaurs. Only when scenery is in front of a character is the scenery also computer generated. Especially good is a scene where characters are travelling through a devastated landscape with small fires still burning. The play of shadows on the characters, although probably not exactly correct, is quite realistic.

Maybe this is what is done with cartoons and such, but there are no opening credits for the voices, which I was looking for, so I was a bit annoyed. It makes it harder to identify who's voicing whom, and I only really got Della Reese, who has a pretty distinctive sound to her. There are credits at the end, but as often happens I've forgotten most of the character names so I have to guess by the usual convention that bigger characters come first in the credits.

As for the story itself, I once said that from the previews it looked like The Lion King with dinosaurs. And there are definite elements which echo that earlier Disney film. We have a kid who ends up being raised by another species, making this kid quite tolerant and open. There's a smarmy sidekick, a young princess type of female for the kid to fall in love with, and a harsh leader trying to maintain his rulership.

But of course there are many differences. There is no singing for one. Also, the bad guys aren't evil so much as ruthless (Kron and Bruton) or just plain old forces of nature (the Carnosaurs). The menagerie is more diverse too, although maybe that's because I don't remember The Lion King that well. Aladar (the protagonist) is really quite a nice dinosaur who's just trying to be helpful to everyone, unlike Simba who finally has to kill Scar.

This movie did seem to be a bit violent for a Disney film, or maybe the level of violence and other adult concepts has been going up in recent years. I overheard some kids say that they were scared of the T-Rex. Maybe the graphics are a bit too real-looking, in cartoons it's easier to tell that the characters aren't real.

I did enjoy the movie, although just barely. I'm not as into kid's films, and at this point I don't know what possessed me to go see this movie. But it's a solid, if simple and somewhat predictable, story. It has relatively interesting characters, quite lifelike and real looking. You can almost empathize with Aladar, although at times he seems to be hopelessly naive and ineffective.

As a final commentary (and this is not something I came up with) it's kind of pointless to have big-name actors doing voices for an animation movie. For the most part they're not paid highly for this, many do it for the chance to do a movie for their kids. It's sort of free publicity for the movie, and it's a rather slimy thing for Disney and other companies to do. Yeah, people have distinctive voices, but I'm sure there are lots of actors with good voices. That's gotta be much easier than acting in front of a camera, so there's no shortage of talent.

All the commercial tie-ins don't really bother me that much. Although it underscores the fact that these movies make a whole lot of money and it's really all going to Disney, not the actors or animators or whatever. I don't see Pixar growing as fast as it could. Ah, that's the way it is.