Another dose of Disney magic

Creatures of the Cretaceous Age stomp the screen once again as Disney's ``Dinosaur'' - the most expensive animated movie ever made - comes to India. ANAND PARTHASARATHY checks out what is happening on the big screen and small, at the cutting edge of computer-assisted animation.

NOTABLE TRIUMPHS in recent years, of the animated motion picture art - like ``A Bug's Life'' and ``Toy Story'' (1 and 2) - have signalled that the old Walt Disney formula is not an exclusive turf any more. Other creative talents and studios have edged in, at the new computer-assisted cutting edge of the animation business. The summer of 2000 saw at least four mainstream American feature-length films, enticing younger audiences with a canny mix of live action, special effects wizardry and computer- enhanced animation. So is Disney about to become a fossilised dinosaur in its own unique niche?

No way - seems to be its upbeat message. And the studio signals that it is prepared to match all challengers, pixel for realistic pixel, with its newest animation product which is called simply: ``Dinosaur''. The film opens all over India this week.

The studio which broke ground in 1937 with the world's first full length animated film ``Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs'', has rarely failed to deliver a wholesome product for the below-tens every year. For its main offering this year, Disney ploughed $ 200 million into its most ambitious and complex film to date, a four-year venture which marked a decisive break from the old traditions of stop-motion, frame by frame animation, by embracing every trick of the computer graphics business.

To answer the challenge posed by special effects specialists, such as Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) of ``Star Wars'' fame, and the new Steven Spielberg studio, Dreamworks, Disney has created its own in house SF facility - Dreamquest - and a new production agency for visual effects, christened intriguingly, The Secret Lab (TSL). ``Dinosaur'' is the first big venture of these new creative entities.

``Dinosaurs have always captured our curiosity - and this is a movie populated almost exclusively with them'', says Thomas Schumacher, president, Walt Disney Feature Animation, ``...For the first time, they are not portrayed as monsters. They are thinking, feeling and protecting one another. Technically this is a movie that could not have been made until now.''

That is because the makers decided to enhance realism with stunning live action backgrounds shot in idyllic locales in Hawaii and Florida in the U.S., and in the virgin wilds of Venezuela and Australia, while the live creatures were totally created on computer. For the outdoor shoots, a computerised camera rig dubbed ``Dino-cam'' was used to provide a roving dinosaur's point of view which later would assist the backroom computer geeks to seamlessly insert the animals they created.

The spectacular proof is visible in the first few minutes of ``Dinosaur'' with its aerial camera swooping down on a grazing herd of thousands of dinos, then following the progress of a dinosaur egg in air and under water, till it ends up on an island populated by lemur primates. The egg hatches to produce the film's main protagonist, an iguanadon named Aladar. And in Disney's time tested formula - from the 1942 classic ``Bambi'' to ``The Jungle Book'' to last year's ``Tarzan'', the kid is brought up by kindly parents of another species. The choice of the iguanadon for the ``hero'' from amongst the 30 types of prehistoric creatures depicted in the film, is a canny one. This is a kindly horse-like dino and hence susceptible to the sort of ``cuddly doll'' treatment of so many Disney animal icons. Not at all like the nasty carnataur - what in Spielberg's ``Jurassic Park'' was known as the T Rex- which is the bad guy of the story. It stalks members of the iguanadon clan that Aladar joins in a long march to a new nesting ground after a crashing meteor destroys their old world.

Being a Disney film, the creatures talk and have distinctive personalities: Kron, the macho leader who believes in ``survival of the fittest''; his sister Neera, who has a crush on the young and kind hearted Aladar, the `dadimaa' of the herd, Baylene (voiced by veteran Shakespearean British stage actress Joan Plowright).... it is the customary cuteness that Disney has been dishing out for seventy years - with one interesting variation.

There are enough grisly teeth-versus-claw encounters as the bad dinos make a meal of the good dinos, for the film to receive a PG or parental guidance certificate in the U.S. - extremely rare for the studio's made-for-kids products. U.S. cinema houses saw very young children crying during some scenes. In India the censors have nevertheless given ``Dinosaur'' a U certificate.

Perhaps the film is made in reluctant recognition that current tastes seem to spell success for violent ``monstrosities'' like Godzilla or King Kong. Indeed, critics faced by the strange mix of goo and gore in ``Dinosaur'' have dubbed it ``Bambi meets Godzilla''. The Washington Post's review concluded: ``Kids of all ages from say, six years, to six years and 3 days, will love it. Anyone younger will be scared. Anyone older will be bored''.

Fortunately that was a minority view point - by and large American reviewers (the film was released there in mid-May) agreed that the film was such a visual feast that the bland story line could be pardoned. The critic of The New York Times admitted that his own opinion was superfluous in the face of that of the ``preschool cinephile'' who accompanied him. He writes: ``What do you think of it'', I asked him. It was scary and cool and nice'', he replied.

The different dinos

While the Disney dinos thunder through the cinema halls, another set of ``cool'' dinos are presently stomping the small screen. The Discovery Channel is half way through a six-part documentary serial made in collaboration with the BBC, ``Walking with Dinosaurs''. Like the Disney movie, the series producer Tim Haines, decided to place these creatures in a real geographical context - and actual locations in New Zealand, Chile and California were shot. ``Jurassic Park was certainly spectacular, but it wasn't an accurate portrayal of dinosaur life'', he says. To achieve this scientific accuracy, the makers had to sift through many conflicting theories about these prehistoric creatures, and the evidence in support of them. When they agreed on what should be shown, the question arose: who could generate the almost three hours of animation required to recreate the dinosaurs? When the special effects company that made ``Jurassic Park'', ILM, was contacted they quoted $10,000 per second! The company that finally found a cost-effective way of meeting the BBC mandate, was ``FrameStore - and it used one fact that weighed in its favour: pictures on television need only one third of the resolution that cinema calls for.

A good workstation could do the basic animation job and the task of ``rendering'' or preparing the final output could be divided between a dozen ordinary PCs. For closeups the company used ``animatronics'' - small animated models which can be moved and shot - to reduce the computer graphics overheads. The result was a sensible, cost- effective solution that nevertheless resulted in one of the best natural life series that either BBC or Discovery has done. ``Walking With Dinosaurs'' can be seen on Discovery Channel on Sundays at 3 pm.

From the 1925 Silent classics, ``The Lost World'', to Hollywood's 1998 nod to the Japanese-inspired ``Godzilla'', gigantic beasts have been something of a special effects forte. ``The Lost World'' was remade twice - in 1960 and 1993, bringing more modern techniques to bear on Arthur Conan Doyle's epic novel. A television version in serial form, can be seen these days on the STAR World channel. ``King Kong'', first brought the beauty-and- beast situation stunningly to life in 1933, and the 1976 remake earned an Oscar for special effects.

``One Million Years BC'' was Hollywood's excuse, circa 1940, to pit Victor Mature against some memorable papier mache dinosaurs. In the 1966 remake, the attention was inevitably stolen by Raquel Welch clad in a fur bikini. Jules Verne's ``Journey to the Centre of the Earth'' had James Mason and singer Pat Boone heading the cast in a mundane fantasy adventure, in 1959. Disney's earlier foray into dino territory was the 1985 ``Baby...Secret of the Lost Legend'', a fairly bizarre live action film about the discovery of a baby dinosaur. But the genre received spectacular reworking at the hands of Steven Spielberg in the 1993 ``Jurassic Park'' and its sequel ``The Lost World'', both based on Michael Crichton novels.

Producer Pam Marsden of the new Disney addition to the genre says: ``This movie is special in all kinds of ways because it continues the legacy of dinosaur movies ... that have always had an important place in film history. It has all the elements of reptiles and action that people love - but it takes advantage of all this great new technology.... the camera can look right in the eye and you see a realistic face with muscles and blinking eyes.''

In ``Dinosaur'', the wonders of computer technology give you massive dinosaur eyes that swell or shrink, tongues that flick, facial muscles that twitch and throats that tighten. If you asked the experts who contributed to the making of the Discovery /BBC serial they will tell you dinos were intelligent creatures but they probably had or displayed no emotions. But this is a Disney film. The message has remained unchanged since the senior Walt's heyday: ``These creatures are like you and me. Why, they even talk!``

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