Mesozoic Mind

Happy New Year everyone! 2024 has fully begun, and admittedly i'm just waiting for it to end already. But that's not what we're here to discuss. Rather, we are doing something more fun and upbeat: looking at childhood memories! Last month, my parents were cleaning the basement, and they found stashed in a cat litter box, books we had put there years ago. What caught my attention were several books I had not read in years as I rummaged through it for fun. Surprise surprise, they were the ones about palaentology and dinosaurs, picture books and a magazine, and I immediately took them and reading them, even after the other books got donated to a thrift store. They came from the Paulian and Beebian ages of the 1990s and early 2000s when children-oriented books like them were all the rage and just about every book had something original to it So we're gonna take a look at some of them to start the year off, just as we look back on our lives and choices at the start of year. ...

It's baaack! I finally got to finish this Marvel-created Dinosaur Rennaisance-era series, or at least the third issue.  The lineup for this book, titled  Bone-Heads and Duck-Bills , goes this time: Ornithopods Hadrosaurs Pachycephalosaurs Mammals The Cretaceous period A soneone who actually likes ornithopods, I'm going to like this book. I'm just not going to cover the informational segments today. They're boring to read for me, and they drag. I may do them seperately instead. Starting with - Oh damn! The colours on this art! Colourist Euan Peters really deserves props here for the bold ones of the lava in the otherwise dark setting, and the same goes for artist Steve Hambridge. Meanwhile, the textboxes really do a great job of conveying an apocalyptic feel and the desperation the creatures face. I wouldn't expect anything less from the esteemed Dan Abnett, best known for his own tales of apocalyptic fiction elsewhere. Anyways, this segment takes place in Mid-Cretac...

Ah, Computer graphic imagery. Before you became so commonplace and went too far in development so fast, you were a fascinating, bergeoning little world living on college campuses and inside basic computers, one of an optimistic future of 1980's Reaganite and Clinton's 90's America. Really, I have a nostalgia for early CG, as there is a genuine, endearing sense of care put into it and a fuzzy dreamlike feel to many of them, as well as growing up with many of these early CG projects.  Today we will be looking at two courtesy of one John C. Donkin, ananimator who worked at Ohio State University's Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design . I know nothing about him at the moment, but I do know he went on to work at Blue Sky Animation and worked on Ice Age . he created two works in a two-part project about the prehistoric creatures we know and love. Keep in mind, this was at the peak of the Dinosaur Renaissance when the image of dinosaurs as succesful and fast creatu...

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...