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...

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...

When you mention dinosaurs and New Zealand, what's the first thing that comes to mind that combines both? Some would say director Peter Jackson and the criminally underrated beasts of his King Kong movie. Others would think of the so-called living fossils of the archipelago from plants to the Tuatara. Still others think of the avian kind of dinosaur from the Cenozoic and by extension the Maori people's time, from the iconic Kiwi to the extinct Moas and the Poukai Eagle . While al of those are valid to think, not many would associate New Zealand with the non-avian dinosaurs, since there aren't really that many fossil sites in the country preserving them. That brings us to this documentary,  The Lost Dinosaurs of New Zealand  from 2002. This Discovery Channel documentary chronicles one of the few major mesozoic fossil sites and the only only one preserving non-avian dinosaurs in the country however fragmentary they are, the people who discovered it, and the implications it ba...

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...

( Link to episode itself ) Hello, and welcome back to Mesozoic Mind. Today, the work we're looking at actually isn't Mesozoic in nature (only at the very,  very start), instead being the era we apes live in, the Cenozoic. I admit as amazing the Cenozoic was/is, my heart is always going to be more interested in the Mesozoic and all works associated with it, but nevertheless, will do my best to take interest in this one. After the monumental success of Walking with Dinosaurs , Tim Haines and Jasper James were working on a next instalment of the series, one focusing on the Cenozoic era and all it's bizarre mammalian life. In fact, their very first idea of the Trilogies of Life was to start off with it, but a mix of the CG of the time being unable to render the CG fur of mammals properly and their general lack of popularity versus dinosaurs led to the first series, but after 2 to 3 years, they were able to, and so they made Walking With Beasts , this year celebrating its 20th a...