Mesozoic Mind

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 beaut...

Hello, everyone (and boy there's little chance of topping the previous Stratigraphy post for a long time, like holy $#!+). Today, we're gonna do our second instalment of Palaeo-Redo. Specifically, we're gonna give a makeover to the 2007 Imax documentary Dinosaurs Alive!  by Giant Screen Films, also the source of the roaring dinosaur so many use on the internet. While I haven't reviewed  Dinosaurs Alive yet, I will tell you there isn't much in the way of Dinosaurs being alive in the film through CG sequences, which are fairly short and few, with most of the doc focusing on palaeontologists of the American Museum of Natural History. While not a bad idea on paper, the fact that there isn't all that much dinosaurs (what people pretty much come for) in it makes it in my opinion a bit of a letdown, not helped by a sluggish pace that makes it hard to get through. This is a shame, as the models for the prehistoric life are all pretty good. But what if things had gone a...

Hoo boy, this is gonna be a toughie to sit through. Today, we are reviewing a very forgotten dinosaur documentary, a work not to be confused with a certain trading card series, generically named Dinosaur Attack . This is a very obscure doc, as while it itself has been uploaded online, albeit under a very dumb clickbait title*, there's next to nothing about it online. It's so obscure for the longest time I couldn't find even the date it was released, though eventually I did and apparently its 1999 (but even then I have my doubts). I gladly appreciate if anyone has more info. The basic premise of the documentary is about the Paluxy River trackway in Texas, which for those not in the know, dates back to the Early Cretaceous and preserves both sauropod and theropod tracks, each possibly made by the respective sauropod and theropod genera Sauroposeidon and Acrocanthosaurus . The neat thing is that based off the way each are arranged, it seems it preserves a hunt in progre...