Dinosaur movie

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As dinosaurs films are films designated where dinosaurs or dinosaur-like creatures play a prominent role. Since the beginning of film history, dinosaurs have been presented on the screen as a special attraction for the audience. In Mark F. Berry's book The Dinosaur Filmography , which in 2005 gave a complete overview of all dinosaur films to date, all films were included that "show one or more specimens of extinct reptiles ". Dinosaur-like representations were included when the filmmakers wanted to show real or fictional dinosaurs. Films about other extinct animals or mythological creatures were not included.

history

Fragment from Gertie On Tour (1921)

The first films made around 1905 that used the possibilities of the new medium to depict these extinct creatures have been lost. The first really successful and still preserved dinosaur films were those about the "wonderfully trained " dinosaur lady Gertie, drawn by Winsor McCay and the film Brute Force directed by David Wark Griffith , which had to make do with dinosaur models that could hardly be animated .

The silent film The Lost World from 1925 is of particular importance . Based on the popular novel The Forgotten World (1912) by Sherlock Holmes author Arthur Conan Doyle , who drew the material of his bestseller from the Bone Wars in the USA and the subsequent finds of the "dinosaur hunters", he does not represent the dinosaurs for the first time aggressive individual monsters , but as animals that can live together peacefully in herds as long as humans do not disturb them. Willis O'Brien was responsible for the animations in stop-motion technology , who had made dinosaur short films for Thomas Alva Edison's Motion Picture Company a decade earlier and for The Ghost of Slumber Mountain (1918) Dinosaurs for the first time under the scientific advice of paleontologist Barnum Brown from the American Museum of Natural History . The Lost World inspired a number of remakes and dinosaur depictions from other films, such as B. in King Kong and the white woman of 1933.

For film producers and directors it was appealing to use film tricks and animated films to bring the dinosaurs , of which one only knew the bones, back to life, at least on the screen. Many monsters took on an appearance in the film that was reminiscent of the scales, bone plates, horns, thorns and teeth of dinosaur fossils .

Since Steven Spielberg's productions In a Land Before Time (1988) and Jurassic Park (1993), improved animation techniques and finally computer animation led to a veritable boom in dinosaur films. The popularity of the extinct prehistoric giants through these films also had an effect on research. Conversely, new insights into the way these reptiles lived in the Mesozoic Era were incorporated into numerous documentaries and television productions. The success of the films provided impetus for Paleo Art , an art form that endeavors to translate scientific findings from paleontology into works of fine art . In film, you can't do without the drafts of these artists and designers for storyboards and models . The exact appearance of the dinosaurs is unknown. In particular, the coloring and the movements can only be reconstructed by comparing them with animals living today. Intuition and imagination are crucial.

Content

People meet dinosaurs - illustration by Édouard Riou for Jules Verne's novel The Journey to the Center of the Earth

The depiction of the dinosaurs in the film had a lasting influence on the popular image of the behavior and way of life of these extinct giant lizards. From the beginning, the dinosaurs were almost always confronted with people today in these films. In reality they were already extinct at the end of the Mesozoic Era 65 million years ago, while the first ancestors of today's humans did not appear until the late Cenozoic Era , at the beginning of the Quaternary around 2.5 million years ago. Various fantastic phenomena have been constructed by writers and screenwriters as reasons for the encounter between humans and dinosaurs. In Jules Verne's novel The Journey to the Center of the Earth , published in 1854 and later often filmed , scientists meet primeval creatures inside the earth. For Arthur Conan Doyle, the “forgotten world” is a previously unexplored part of the South American jungle in which dinosaurs were able to survive. With The Lost World, Conan Doyle created a topos that is inextricably linked with adventurers and dinosaurs.

DW Griffith made it easier for himself in his 1914 film Brute Force . To make his feature film about the behavior of Stone Age people more interesting, he showed scenes in which dinosaurs threaten humans. The framework story makes it clear that the Stone Age scenario only takes place in the imagination of a bored party guest in Griffith's own time. Still, the combination of early mankind with the extinct giants remained a cliché that is regularly repeated in the film. In the cartoon series Flintstones (1960–1966) it is exploited in a humorous way. Another pattern often used in dinosaur films can also be traced back to Griffith's brute force : the animals are depicted as bloodthirsty monsters that reflexively attack anything that moves. It was not until the film adaptation of Willis O'Brien's The Lost World from 1925 that dinosaurs were shown not only as solitary predators, but also as peace-loving herd animals.

See also

literature

  • Donald F. Glut , Michael K. Brett-Surman: Dinosaur and the Media. In: James Orville Farlowe, Michael K. Brett-Surman (Eds.): The Complete Dinosaur. Indiana University Press Bloomington 1999, ISBN 0-253-21313-4 , pp. 675-706.
  • William AS Sarjeant: Dinosaurs in Fiction . In: H. Darren and K. Carpenter (Eds.): Mesozoic Vertebrate Life. Indiana University Press, Bloomington 2001, ISBN 0-253-33907-3 pp. 04-529.
  • Baird Searles: Chapter: Dinosaurs and Others . In Films of Science Fiction and Fantasy. AFI Press, New York 1988, ISBN 0-8109-0922-7 , pp. 104-116.
  • Roy P. Webber: The Dinosaur Films of Ray Harryhausen: Features, Early 16mm Experiments and Unrealized Projects. McFarland, Jefferson 2004, ISBN 0-786-41666-1 .
  • Allen A. Debus: Dinosaurs in Fantastic Fiction. A Thematic Survey. McFarland, Jefferson 2006, ISBN 0-786-42672-1 .
  • Mark F. Berry: The Dinosaur Filmography. McFarland, Jefferson 2005, ISBN 0-786-42453-2 .

Web links

  • Dinosaur film in the dictionary of film terms from Bender-Verlag

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Fascination Dinosaurs on Kinoweb.de
  2. ^ Mark F. Berry: The Dinosaur Filmography. McFarland, Jefferson 2005, ISBN 0-7864-1028-0
  3. ^ Edward Summer: Celluloid and Digital Dinosaurs: A History of Dinosaur Movies ( Memento March 15, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) In: dinosaur.org. May 30, 2006, accessed May 17, 2020.
  4. ^ Donald F. Glut, Michael K. Brett-Surman: Dinosaur and the Media. In: James Orville Farlowe, Michael K. Brett-Surman (Eds.): The Complete Dinosaur. Indiana University Press, Bloomington 1999, ISBN 0-253-21313-4 , p. 679.
  5. ↑ From Gertie to Godzilla: The most important dinosaur films on tvspielfilm.de
  6. ↑ Smithsonian Institution: Paleo Art (English)
  7. ^ Anthony J. Martin: Introduction to the Study of Dinosaurs. Blackwell, Malden 2005, ISBN 1-405-13413-5 , p. 17.