In a way, even dinosaurs are about animating inanimate objects, giving life to that which has no life – now. What put me off dinosaurs is the presentation of them as munching machines. Very few stop motion dinosaurs exhibit much psychology or motivation beyond eating and surviving, and while the animation challenge and endless possibilities of bringing these creatures to life must be hugely exciting, there wasn’t much chance of acting, and it’s acting that drives me. We’ve seen dinosaurs full of detail, but I am more satisfi ed when dealing with complex emotions. We were all looking forward to Paul Berry’s Arnold; A Million Sequins BC, a fi lm that would have shown dinosaurs in a very diff erent light.
TD – I had a long period of fascination with dinosaurs. Strangely, I was never drawn to animate them. I was more intrigued with the Canadian National Film Board animation.
RH – I loved dinosaurs since collecting models of them after visiting the Natural History Museum in London. As a Cub I got a ‘Collecting’ badge for my collection of dinosaurs. I loved them in the original King Kong and Fantasia. I’m still thrilled by them today, although I’ve never animated one.
JC – I had no dinosaurs and wasn’t interested in them (though my little brother knew all the names before he could read).
FL – I always loved natural history museums, but never thought about dinosaurs as characters for movies. Recently I did my fi rst ‘artistic’ approach to a dinosaur, trying to follow a tutorial on making a T-rex armature.
DS – I don’t recall being a dinosaur freak or having any model dinosaurs or being insistent on seeing them in a museum, but I loved the schools radio programme where they took you back in time, especially those that went back to prehistory and the dinosaur age. Pete (Lord) and I might have animated the odd scaly dinosaur.
Paul’s early death prevented this fi lm being made but, from the short, exquisitely animated pilot, it was clearly going to be a hysterical, moving and very personal fi lm. Arnold was a dinosaur whose taste for cocktails, make-up, high heels and the fi ne things of life innocently, but ultimately brought about the extinction of the dinosaurs. There were moves to get the fi lm made after Paul’s death, but it simply would not have been the same. Paul’s animation is astonishing, being complex and clear at the same time. You understand exactly what the movement is about and what the character is thinking. His many years of working on series such as The Wind in the Willows and Truckers at Cosgrove Hall probably gave him the ability to focus on only what was important. There is no clutter in his animation, an aspiration for us all. I can only imagine what great work Paul would be directing now.
I have never animated a dinosaur (although working with dinosaurs on the previz for the recent Kong was great fun), other than a pterodactyl made out of potato chips for a commercial in which the creature chased a live-action boy and wrestled him for his potato chips … hmm, thinking about that, that’s odd, even by our standards. Even though it was a totally imagined shape it was fun working out how the thing would fl y with that anatomy.
A crispy pterodactyl.
To animate a dinosaur, giving the impression of necessary size, would be a challenge. Looking at Willis O’Brien’s footage for The Lost World, there is some impressive movement, but little account of the mass and scale of the creatures, betraying them as miniatures. It’s hard to believe that these huge creatures could fl ick their long necks and tails from side to side in the passing of a few frames. A small model needs only a few frames to move its
head an inch or so, but when multiplied to the imagined size of a dinosaur this movement equates to fi fteen feet or so, and needs more time and thus more frames to suggest the creature’s scale. A recent commercial spoofi ng One Million Years BC had a stop motion dinosaur doing exactly these quick movements. I hope this was a loving homage, not just weak animation, as it did advertise that it was a tiny model.
Dinosaurs have always been associated with animation and linked with new advances in technology. To have been the fi rst to see Gertie moving, and apparently reacting to a live actor, must have been extraordinary. O’Brien’s creatures, and subsequently those from Harryhausen and Danforth, probably took the skill of animating them as far as possible. The sublimely realistic creatures in Jurassic Park have undoubtedly changed dinosaurs and animation in general. Audiences will hardly accept a stop motion creature masquerading as reality in a live-action fi lm now, unless done with a huge tongue in a huge ironic cheek, as in The League of Gentlemen’s Apocalypse. However, it is clear that the public has an insatiable appetite for a wholly stop motion world, as in The Nightmare Before Christmas, Corpse Bride, Max and Co. and Wallace and Gromit. To mix the two techniques is a little uncomfortable, as invariably the seams show.
So many theories exist of how these dinosaurs walked and how agile they were, and credibly reconstructing their movement would be a fascinating detective story. The stop motion shot in preproduction for Jurassic Park by Phil Tippett shows creatures with real energy and dynamics, but still looking heavy: they look utterly credible. After a test screening of footage from King Kong, Merien C. Cooper was called by a natural history museum suggesting that is was unlikely that dinosaurs could have roared, as they seemingly didn’t have any vocal chords. It’s probably a good thing that fi lm-makers often ignore the facts, but it’s hard to think of those creatures as silent, although the giraff e is a silent animal. You may think with a neck that size there would be all manner of vocal tricks, so maybe it was the same with the dinosaurs. However, fi lm-making is about creating the credible, not the real.
Most fi lms about dinosaurs need human characters to drive the fi lm, certainly making the contrasting scales work, and demonstrating the archetypal story of man versus monster, with the dinosaurs’ success dependent on how seamlessly they interact with human actors. The digital dinosaurs of Jurassic Park stampeded across the big screen, chasing and eating the live- action cast very convincingly. They have since gobbled up television audiences with so many series along the lines of Walking with Dinosaurs that we’ll get Walking with Zimmer Frames
soon. Excuses to feed the dinosaur-hungry audience grow feebler as the dinosaurs get more credible. A recent programme speculated that we might have tamed them as pets had they not died out. Cue that especially skilled group of performers acting against beautifully animated computer graphics (CG) creatures; a skill that stop motion animators have, incidentally. Dinosaurs will always be useful to kickstart a fi lm and to project any manner of subtext. Unlike the real thing, dinosaurs in fi lm are here to stay, although I am happy to see that the dinosaurs of fi lms like Journey to the Centre of Earth (real lizards with stuck-on fi ns doing gruesome battle and being submerged in ‘lava’) and At the Earth’s Core (men in rather dire rubber suits) are an extinct breed. I’m not sure that we will ever see a stop motion dinosaur fi ghting live actors again, but dinosaurs seem to be a benchmark for each generation’s technology and reinvented for their own purposes. Animated skeletons run a close second here, from Georges Méliès, through Harryhausen, to The Corpse Bride and beyond.