Dinotopia (miniseries)


Dinotopia is a four-hour TV miniseries co-produced by Walt Disney Television and Hallmark Entertainment. It is based on the fictional world of Dinotopia, a utopia in which sentient dinosaurs and humans coexist, created by American author James Gurney. The miniseries uses plot details from Gurney's first two Dinotopia books, Dinotopia and Dinotopia: The World Beneath, although it takes place in a time farther into the future. The main characters are two American teenage boys from a contemporary time frame. The boys crash their father's plane into the sea and get stranded on Dinotopia, where they must adjust to a new society. The story in the film contains references to many of the characters in the book series, with some of their descendants occupying key roles in the plot. The original score was composed by Trevor Jones. This score is performed by the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Geoffrey Alexander.
The miniseries premiered as installments of The Wonderful World of Disney from May 12–14, 2002 on ABC. It received an Emmy Award for Outstanding Special Visual Effects for a Miniseries, Movie or a Special. It was soon followed by a television series which only lasted for one season.

Plot

A pair of teenage half-brothers, Karl and David Scott, are on a flight with their father Frank on his private plane when Karl takes over the controls, so his father can fall asleep. After flying into a storm, Karl struggles, causing Frank to retake control before it crashes into the ocean. Frank saves his sons, but has trouble escaping the crashed plane as his seatbelt fails to release. Karl and David wash up on the shore of a large uncharted island. Looking for help, Karl and David meet a man named Cyrus Crabb who informs them that they are in Dinotopia, a hidden civilization where human beings and dinosaurs co-exist peacefully. Crabb leads the boys to a village, where the boys are surprised to see that they are wearing clothes from different cultures in different time periods. There, they witness a young Dinotopian woman, Marion Waldo, pacify a Ankylsaurus with a toothache. The two boys befriend her and hitch a Brachiasaur "bus" ride to Waterfall City. During the journey, the "Brachs" become distressed by an unseen presence. Marion, David, Karl and the Brach bus conductor investigate the forest nearby and find Tyrannosaurus Rex footprints. Marion is unsettled by this, as Tyrannosauruses do not usually hunt in packs and that they are "not evil, just hungry by nature". She begins to sense a strange unbalance, after discovering the destroyed remains of a Dinotopian village. For the Brachs's safety, the group spends the night in the village. Later in the night, the group is attacked by the raiding T-Rex pack. Karl, David and Marion run for their lives, as the Tyrannosaurus hunt them down. Marion trips and falls, and is nearly killed by a T-Rex when a group of Skybax Riders, humans riding on Pterodactyl-like dinosaurs, distract and scare away the Tyrannosauruses. The Skybax squadron leader, Oonu, offers to escort the Brachs to Waterfall.
In fact, some of the dinosaurs, notably a neurotic but friendly Stenonychosaurus named Zippo, possess human intelligence and speak perfect English. Among the many rules in Dinotopia is the edict that, once an outsider arrives, he or she is never allowed to leave. As Karl and David prepare to take their places in their new surroundings, both boys develop a strong bond with young Marion, who is on the verge of becoming a "matriarch" of the Dinotopian society. Legend has it that their ancestors lived in an underworld that was lit by sunstones. Cyrus has been stealing artifacts and books to try and find a way off the island. Zippo discovers all the stolen items, but Cyrus knocks him out and throws him in a water canal. Meanwhile, Karl finds a Dino egg and gets sent on a mission by himself. The sun-stones keep mysteriously breaking which causes the dinos to attack. David needs to learn to conquer his fears. Unfortunately, the incursion of vicious carnivores, not to mention an unanticipated human villain, threaten to destroy Dinotopia and everyone living there.

Cast

Plans for a Dinotopia film were previously rejected due to the expense of creating a world populated by both humans and dinosaurs. Both Columbia Pictures and Disney at one time made the attempt, but both studios abandoned the idea, with Disney opting to make their own homegrown film, Dinosaur in 2000. Hallmark Entertainment chief Robert Halmi Sr. then purchased the rights after having seen Gurney's book.
Halmi was willing to spend $80 million on the film, despite the performance of his previous fantasy miniseries, The Tenth Kingdom. ABC had so much confidence in the miniseries that they began shooting episodes of the spin-off television series before the miniseries had aired.
More than 75% of the scenes in the miniseries required visual effects, many of which required interaction between the live-action human actors and the animatronic or computer-animated dinosaurs. The computer-animated dinosaurs were created by a London-based company, Framestore CFC, who also did the CGI work for the Walking with Dinosaurs series. The series also used other visual effects techniques such as digital set extensions. Many of the sets were only partially built, the rest being done digitally, in order to create the enormous buildings used by both dinosaurs and humans in the film. Even so, the actual set for Waterfall City, Dinotopia's capital, took up five-and-a-half acres of the back lot of England's Pinewood Studios. Jim Henson's Creature Shop provided the animatronic dinosaurs.
Although Dinotopia started out as a TV miniseries, later all the parts were combined and put on DVD as one film, except in the UK, where the mini-series was put onto discs as separate episodes.

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