2D Animation in Palaeo-Documentaries: A Brief History
When we think of 2D animation and palaeo-media, we have quite a lot thanks to choose from, ranging in tastes from the Burianian epic adventures of Don Bluth's The Land Before Time, the anachronistic sitcom antics of The Flintstones, to the gory pulp of Gennedy Tartovsky's Primal (2019), or even the Mons-collecting anime of Dinosaur King. But surprisingly, one section of it has never quite been all that prominent: documentaries. Don’t believe me? What’s the first palaeo-documentary which uses traditional animation to come to mind?
Admit it, you can’t really name one. It’s a shame, as traditional animation is in my humble opinion the best medium out there: it allows much more creative freedom then live action, ages better then CG, and is less-time consuming then stop-motion. Just imagine a documentary on the level of Walking with Dinosaurs or Prehistoric Planet animated in the style of Disney Renaissance or Studio Ghibli. Just the idea is already beautiful ain't it? But until then, let's take a look at a history of dinosaure documentaries that dipped into the drawing board.
The vast majority of 2D docs naturally came from the time before the advent of CG and to a lesser extent the animatronics in the 80’s and 90’s onward, a time where the majority was otherwise stop motion; just going to get this out of the way and say most are of the Knightian and Burianian periods. It could be argued that the famous "Rite of Spring" segment of Disney's Fantasia, while ostensibly entertainment, also doubled as an educational look at the history of the earth at a time when most average people knew squat about earth sciences, so its more edutainment. You can see the seeds of so many other documentary palaeo-media in it, particularly with the more lowkey, peaceful behaviour of the dinosaurs (before the point where the T. rex shows up).
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| One of my favourite stills from Rite Of Spring, BTW |
But honestly I'm gonna stick to pure docs for this post, so no further comment on Fantasia nor edutainment works that have a lerger focus on etertainment like I'm a Dinosaur. Maybe another day I'll look at either Disney's segment or those edutainment works.
The proper first 2D-utisling doc (that I know of) is 1960's Journey Into Time by Viking Films and Sterling, which provides for classes of the time a brief overview of deep time as it was understood back then, from the first forms of life, to the dinosaurs, to the Cenozoic. Given that this is the cold war, humanity is treated as the crowning achievement of evolution, and ovverall the fauna is treated in the Knightian school.
However, I will still give it credit. The grainy, black and white animation, while not exactly up to par for, is fairly decent and does its job, giving a very alien and hazy feel. The animation is quite fluid for its time too.
(credit to Titanlizard and his Twitter for reminding me for it)
Next in 1978 came a short documentary that... wasn't as good, Dinosaurs: a First Film. To call it animated is a bit of a stretch, since most of it are still drawings with only a few body parts moving at any given time. It's just an overview of the evolution of dinosaurs and the paleozoic, and not done in a very good way either. Most if not all the animals barely resemble their basises and instead look like he fibreglass models of a Cold War-era roadside attraction.
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| As much motion you're gonna see in here |
Moving on, 1992 marks the most well-known use of traditional animation with a four-part PBS series simply titled The Dinosaurs!. Rooted firmly in the Dinosaur Renaissance and with the Paulian style of design, it used it's vignettes to illustrate the evidence of them as warm-bloodedly active and successful. It's all done by Encyclopedia Britannica of all guys (hence why you may have seen their designs in their own media). Needless to say, they're quite good, despite totalling only 23 minutes in the series: they're fairly fluid and the colour palate is often bright and bold, and even when it isn't you can still tell there was enough passion put into it.
The same year would see on the other side of the pond The Velvet Claw, a documentary by the BBC, about the history of carnivorous mammals. To depict the prehistoric life, animation was made by one Disney alumnus Stuart Brooks. The animation here bears a stylised art style that is much looser and hazy, with no little to no defined outlines. Point is they're very good animation, which goes for a primordial and mythologial feel.
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| An example from the first episode, The Carnasal Connection |
The show's footage, particularly of the first episode, has also been featured in other documentaries, most notably Paleoworld.
Three years later 1995 would see a highly obscure doc and the next example, Dinosaurs on Earth: Then...and Now, which aside from one paywalled site, has never been uploaded. it was produced by National Geographic and the highly obscure Migeul's Studios for the 2D parts.
From what I can gather, its mostly just a summery of various dinosaurs mixed with the animatronics of Dinamation and other dinomania of the 90's, so not too much to miss. Selected species from it include Utahraptor, Brachiosaurus, and as you see above, Dilophosaurus. The sole footage released is from when it was stock footage in fellow Nat Geo release Really Wild Animals: Dinosaurs and Other Creature Features.
From what I can tell, they are fairly simplistic walk cycles in profile with a few hunting scenes, and the animation is fairly unremarkable for the time, and so otherwise aren't worth discussing further.
Unfortunately, the already limited age of traditionaly animated docs would start to plummet vastly in the 90's and onward. As CG became more and more accesible for the masses, it being less-consuminbg then hand-drawn animation meant the latter would all but vanish. Walking with Dinosaurs' awe-inspiring CG was the death knell for documentaries like these.
However, while still very limited then it had ever been, not all disappeared. In 2002 came one of the more minor yet still notable uses of 2D animation in a paleodoc with The Lost Dinosaurs of New Zealand. I have already discussed it there, but the jist is that when the documentary isn't using bad CG to recreate dinosaurs, it uses highly stylised hand-drawn animation courtesy of the sadly now defunct Auckland-based Slightly Off Beat Productions. They are done in the style of animated field journal entries, and feature several animated reptiles which bear expressive faces. While admittedly they're rather simplistic (they don't even have too much in the waty of shading!), they're still not too bad, and the cartoonish art style helps give an extra layer of memorability to it, as expected from how Slightly-Offbeat usually traded in cartoons for Disney.
Afterwards, what little 2D animation works were usually flash animated (as with 2D animation as a whole) as opposed to hand drawn. A good example is 2018's Dinosaur Cold Case, co-produced between CBC's The Nature of Things and the Smithsonian Channel, documenting the nodosaur Borealopelta. It makes use short vignettes in the style of comic book art, apparently known as GFX, to recreate the Early Cretaceous world of Canada and the species that lived in here and the death of the well-preserved dinosaur. The designs are good, though the Acrocanthosaurus looks like a friggin' claymation demon here.
Admittedly the segments aren't much (just a few minutes each), but I like it: I'm a sucker for comic-style animation, and at the time I watched it I enjoyed them.
Also, even if its not mentioned explicitly, Zephyrosaurus makes its debut in palaeomedia outside of books.
So after all these years, what does the future hold for 2D animation in palaeo-documentaries and what can we learn from it?
While we still have a wide variety of narratives to choose from, it sadly seems that the age of 2D Animation in Palaeo-Documentaries (outside of edutainment) has all but vanished. Nowhere in the last four years have I heard of any 2D animated documentaries being announced let alone released to my knowlefge. While I hope that I am wrong and there are new ones out there, it seems traditional animation, much like the rest for the most part, is at best on hiatus and at worst outright dead.
I think one of the biggest advantages 2D animation has over CG is the variety it allows. Just looking at the screengrabs here shows the variety of animation styles, from realistic to stylised. CG in documentaries meanwhile tends to only differ in quality of its level and the specific designs of it, from simple basic textures to very detailed but is usually always "realistic".
One idea I had in particular was having more stylised art reminiscent of world cultures' art depending on where the setting is. For instance, one about Spinosaurus and its ecosystem could have an art style like that of Ancent Egyptian heiroglyph art, with profile only views and fairly flat but wide composition, or perhaps Chinese dinosaurs recreatec in the myriad of artstyles it has made, or even Indian taxa in the style of Indian shadow puppets.
While 3D computer animation had all but long established itself as the default medium to portray prehistory and most 2D palaeo-media has been and is in the realm of fiction narratives, I hope that one day we will see more traditionally animated documentaries that showcase deep time and its denizens.
Well, I'm sure I missed at least one 2D doc. Let me know if I did, and will add to this post.
Goodbye for now! I hope you enjoyed this!
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