Mesozoic Mind

Today's subject was watched a lot by me as a kid on the mythical format known as DVDs, an animated film with the rather generic title of Dinosaur Island , direcyed by Will Meugniot of Exo-Squad fame and released by defunct animation studio DiC. Dinosaur Island 's plot is about four teens being selected for a competitive reality show to win a million dollars, but the plane taking them to their destination crashes, and where they land is a lost world wehere dinosaurs still roa, ans must survive it. Sound familiar? Supposedly this is is an adaptation of The Lost World  by Arthur Conan Doyle, the Camp Cretaceous to the latter's Jurassic World if you will. Let's get the biggest problem out of the way with DI'02 : the animation is not very good. DiC was infamous from its stiff and flat animation and art style, especially towards the end of its lifetime, and here the animation is very reflective of that. Everything moves relatively jerky, and the backgrounds aren't...

Hello, smd welcome back to Mesozoic Mind, the blog that's ostensibly about all things mesozoic but is about mostly documentaries. Today, we are focusing on a documentary from 2019 co-produced between Japan's NHK and the American streaming service CuriosityStream, the awkwardly-titled  Amazing Dinoworld . When it debuted, it was a bit of a big deal in palaeo-media circles, as it was pretty much the first big dinosaur documentary in years, coming during a dry spell for palaeo-documentaries in the middle and late 2010's, which were usually one-off specials and never really stuck or made too big an impact; there weren't really any equivelents of Walking with Dinosaurs , Dinosaur Planet , or even Dinosaur Revolution earlier in the decade. But then came this, first appaing in the form of trailers and promos with Japanese titles, and theyu looked fantastic, with feathers on full display. I bought a subsctiption to CuriosityStream just to watch it on end, and I loved every min...

Hello, this is Mesozoic Mind. It's the first week of the spooky season, and what better way to celebrate then a horror work? Ambush A game can be summed up as  Alien: Isolation WITH RAPTORS. You play as ascintist who has arrived in a Lost World-type setting, but something happens that leads a pack of a Dakotaraptor  or Deinonychus -esque species to ambush you: perhaps you were in the wrong place at the wrong time as they were hunting, or disturbed them by entering their territory. You do manage to escape, and the pack goes away - except for one, who sees your escape as an insult to its pride, and goes rogue to hunt you down. What follows is a chase through the shadowy jungles to reach a rendevous point where you can escape as the raptor could appear anywhere and ambush you before eating you alive, and that's not without considering what other animals might attack you first as you run into their path. To survive the raptor, you must either put enough distance between it, or hi...

Hello, and welcome back to Mesozoic Mind . Today we will be looking at two very similar documentaries: they are both about the prehistoric life of Australia, both have the same release date of 1995, are roughly 23 minutes long, and most crucially both use stop-motion to portray their creatures, a time-honoured tradition going back to the earliest years of 20th century dinosaur media. Also, do be aware I had a cold in the latter stages of writing this, hence why it feels rushed at points. Once Upon Australia Once Upon Australia is a general overview of Australia in deep time, with an emphasis on the Cretaceous period and Cenozoic era, created by noted stop-motion animator of the continent Nick Hilligoss. After some CG and live action footage which represents most of the time before the Devonian era, the stop-motion begins with a march representing the evolution of tetrapods. Eventually the creatures split off down different paths - literally. To represent the split of synapsids and dia...