Mesozoic Mind

David Armsby is a Scottish animator. He's done a lot of science fiction wio, but he has quite the affinity for dinosaurs, as evidenced by the triad of animated shorts he has made over the 2010's and into the 2020's.  Small Beginnings (2013) Small Beginings is about a newly-hatched baby T. rex who goes out with her mother only for another one to kill her, leaving him an orphan. Years later when he is an adult, she returns to the cliff where it happened, and goes back to her own nest to continue . As far quality goes, its fine on its own, although it does have a hefty dose of Early Instalment Weirdness to it: the short is made in full CG, one more cartoonish then realistic. The designs have the usual array of JP or Paulian: lipless jaws and tooth slippage and feel a bit too slender. In other words, there's not much in the way of heavy realistic research going on for the creatures within it, instead opting for something on the lighter side of the awesomebro styles. The to...

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...

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...