You could call it The Gladiator Principle: spend fortunes meticulously recreating ancient Rome, then totally ignore the actual events of history.
Disney’s new 3D-animated blockbuster Dinosaur does something similar. Millions were spent on state-of-the-art technology and teams of experts were hired to bring to life dinosaurs of maximum accuracy and verisimilitude. Then, into the story, they introduced lemurs – which were not very likely to have been around in their present form 63-million years ago.
Yes, there was some kind of small creature of approximately lemuresque size and shape that may have coexisted with the dinosaurs, but Disney admits that throwing lemurs into the plot is taking some liberties with the fossil record. I suppose it wouldn’t be an animated Disney movie without at least one nuclear family of cute furry little creatures.
Of course, it’s only a story, a fantasy, so it doesn’t matter. You can explain the reality to the kids (who will love it) later. I mean, dinosaurs couldn’t speak, to the best of our knowledge, and lemurs still can’t, but you don’t have much of a Disney adventure if the characters are all mute. No boy dinosaur meets girl dinosaur, no standing up to the bully dinosaur, no important life-affirming messages about how compassion and community are better than survival of the fittest. Tell that to T-Rex. Or to a mega-corporation like Disney.
Perhaps one takes greater notice of the friction between the carefully researched surface and the purely imaginary narrative because
Dinosaur is visually so superb. It looks so real that the storyline conventions creak insistently. The echoes of Bambi (cute talking animals), Tarzan (lemurs foster dinosaur) and Moses (a trek across the desert to the promised land), among others, are swathed in contemporary 3D animation at its peak. This is animation that doesn’t seem like animation: no trace of drawing, no flat surfaces in garish colours. This looks as realistic as it is possible to make completely imaginary creatures look. It can’t be long until human actors become entirely redundant.
The whole extravaganza cost Disney some $200-million – at least, that’s what they will admit to. Titanic, hitherto the world’s most
expensive movie, cost that – and Disney, which seems as hooked on secrecy and ideological one-upmanship as the Kremlin of Stalin’s
day, is pegging Dinosaur‘s costs there. Industry rumour has it, though, that the film cost something closer to $285-million, which would make it the costliest movie ever made. But that’s okay, because in the weeks between the time Dinosaur knocked Gladiator off the top box-office spot in the United States and when it was itself deposed by Mission: Impossible II, it raked in some $320-million.
Many of the costs that went into developing Dinosaur have probably been shaved off that film’s budget and put down as general development costs – like the building of a special digital set, named the Secret Lab, which will stand Disney in good stead for future productions of this kind. Its existence was dramatically revealed by Disney CEO Michael Eisner in Newsweek magazine as Dinosaur was released in the US. No one knew in advance how much Dinosaur would cost to make, but it was worth finding out – an investment in not just one movie, but in the future of 3D animation. If the company that brought the world Mickey Mouse and The Lion King was to maintain its position as the world’s leading animation studio, it was money Eisner had to spend.
The results are extraordinary. The movie has pushed the boundaries of animation into new realms, making the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park look decidedly jerky by comparison. Maybe Dinosaur, too, will look dated in a few years’ time, so swift is progress in this area, but for the moment it looks very impressive indeed.
And so it should. Apart from that gargantuan budget, it took five years of hard labour by some 350 people to get it right. The project was first greenlighted by Disney in 1988, with director Paul Verhoeven of RoboCop and Starship Troopers fame due to make it in a mixture of live-action and stop-motion (scale models filmed one frame at a time). But that felt a bit old-fashioned, so Disney moved Dinosaur to its animation department, which started experimenting with the techniques that made it what we see today.
The production began with artists and dino-experts throwing around ideas for eight months. Individual artists were employed to develop specific areas – for instance, one worked purely on musculature, while another developed the environment of the Cretaceous period (tell the kids that’s 63- to 135-million years ago, following the Jurassic, which began some 50-million years earlier).
Disney got in natural history lecturers to brief the animators. Team members were sent to a zoo to ride elephants. The bones of a real 100-million-year-old tenontosaurus, similar to the iguanodon that is the film’s hero, were laid out and examined by co-director Eric Leighton at a Montana museum.
And then, after all that research, the demands of Disney storytelling took over. The protagonist of the original script had been a styrachosaur, a “hefty bow-legged animal” reminiscent of a rhino. But its small face and beak, says Leighton, “would have made it very difficult for dialogue purposes”. So it was changed to an iguanodon, which was “more horse-like” and to which, Leighton explains, the
film-makers could more easily “attach emotions”.
Six animators worked on the hero Aladar alone; supporting characters such as the enormous brachiosaur Baylene got two or three. Artists were drawn from traditional Disney drawing-based animation and from stop-motion and enouraged to expand their talents into the new computer-generated (CG) medium.
The term CG is slightly misleading, though, in that not everything is actually generated within the computer. Its beauty lies, rather, in its ability to seamlessly merge many elements from different sources. The Dinosaur backgrounds, for instance, are real places, from Hawaii to the Mojave Desert and Samoa, which have been tweaked (skies freshened up, for instance) and into which the dinosaurs have been slipped. Splashes of water or clouds of dust were filmed in matte style against black backdrops and then scanned into the computer; dino-feet models were created and stomped into real dirt or water. We get lots of stomping dino-feet.
But the most innovative aspects of the 3D animation in Dinosaur occur at the level of detail – the texture and movement of dinosaur skin, the fur of the lemurs. Fur stylist Charles Colladay, in particular, had his work cut out for him. Fur was not something CG animation had previously been very good at, so this was a major challenge. Each lemur has some 1,1-million hairs on its body, roughly the same as we humans have. To achieve the greatest possible degree of realism, Colladay and his colleagues had to “take the surface of each model and break it down into manageable patches” – 450 patches for each lemur. They then mapped “the length and density of each patch of fur”.
The software to do this took six months to write; a year was spent on mommy lemur Plio alone. In the meantime, Colladay was at home wetting his cats to see what the effect was. The lemurs in the movie have to do some emergency swimming, but Colladay’s local zoo wasn’t too keen on his drenching their denizens to find out what a wet lemur looked like. So the poor cats had to do – let’s hope they got some reward for their pioneering work. Colladay analysed the way the cats’ wet hair stuck up in pointy clumps, and, to reproduce that effect in the movie, a “clumping tool” was created in the computer program. Now the animators could click on a target hair and a bunch of other hairs would clump around it.
This was possible because, amazingly, each computerised lemur hair had been given a serial number. A brush-shaped cursor allowed grooming and positioning of specific areas, which meant the hairs could react to the movements of other creatures and so forth. This technique solved not only the problem of getting the lemur fur to behave, but was a great help in another area, saving the film-makers a considerable amount of time and effort.
The lush green valley to which the dinosaurs trek had been shot on Hawaii, but now the animators had to capture the effect of the arrival of a herd of dinosaurs. How to get the grass of the valley to react to the dino-feet, to be flattened and then spring back to about 80% of its former erectness? Simple – get out the lemur-hair tool, cover the valley floor in enlarged lemur hairs, paint them green, and hey presto, realistic grass. Mickey Mouse, one suspects, would be speechless.