First post So let's start with one of the things that have always been with me since I was a child, dinosaurs. However, let's go back a little further to a time when I wasn't even born yet and dinosaurs were considered only movie monsters...
The words "terrible lizard" are technically a literal translation of the name "dinosaur," and the truth is that their first representations portray them in a unique way when it comes to that particular thing. Because it does give the illusion that it is a completely different and alien world to the one we are used to; however, there are many things that I personally find difficult to swallow about old movies.
But let's make something clear.
I'M NOT TALKING ABOUT THIS
As beautiful as Ray Harry Hausen's animation is, the truth is that his portrayal of dinosaurs in the films he worked on isn't among my favorites at all. While it certainly adds to the trope of cavemen living alongside dinosaurs in a vast desert—and I'm sure that has a name, though I'm not sure what it is—and it's also a fundamental piece of film history, I can't say it's one of my favorite depictions of dinosaurs, not even from that era. The simple fact is that they're usually portrayed more like giant monsters or monstrous creatures that, for some reason, live in a desert and just want to kill two small humans. It's fun to watch, of course, but it's not one of my favorites.
A while ago, this YouTube video perfectly described the feeling I get when I watch this kind of thing. It's not just about seeing monsters, but about seeing an alien world, something that would be impossible to survive if you were to travel through time somehow. And there are many media where I love how this is represented, where dinosaurs are treated as a kind of creature in their own ecosystem, of course, but one so aggressive that it's impossible to stay still without the risk of being eaten.
Let's see a few examples:
We start with my least favorite, cartoons, and in this case we have three examples: The Land Before Time. We're Back a Dinosaur Story & Disney's Fantasia.
What's interesting about all of these is that they fall into a category similar to dark fantasy, and while dark fantasy is usually associated with more violent or adult themes like Game of Thrones, what I'm referring to here is the kind of dark fantasy that portrays natural or narrative elements that aren't fantasy as such, but rather show an exaggerated or fantastical version of real-life elements—in this case, the life of dinosaurs.
Note also how most of these audiovisual products contain a huge variety of dinosaurs that never actually coexisted, but it makes sense that they're there in a kind of simulated ecosystem. Of course, it's not accurate, and it would be far from ideal in real life. But you can't help but think that before you arrive to visit them, they already had a previous life, their own things and matters to attend to before the cameras even arrive. It's as if the world feels alive before the movie even starts. The only modern product that has achieved that feeling for me has been Genndy Tartakovsky's Primal. However, not here, because there's one specific detail that I still like more about this type of dinosaur representation, and that's the way they walk.
Here we have another of my favorite examples in this case, The Lost World from 1925, one of the most influential dinosaur movies in history, but which is also a joy to watch for the simple fact that there are moments in the film where it simply forgets about the characters and focuses on long shots of interactions with dinosaurs, and while all this may become quite generic or even normal by modern standards, at the time it was quite revolutionary, mainly because even for the time the film was made, it was quite ahead of its time.
We have to keep in mind that at the time dinosaurs were being studied, the prevailing idea was that the creatures were slow, clumsy, and evolutionary failures that shouldn't have even existed. The conception of them as antediluvian monsters and simply as mistakes of nature had long since been abandoned. However, several of the animators in the film decided to give them animal characteristics to make them more believable. Simple things like the allosaurus retreating after the triceratops attack because it's unwilling to risk another injury if it fails to kill its target, the triceratops protecting its young, a tyrannosaur taking advantage of the fire to try to take down a brachiosaurus, or the trachodon fighting the allosaurus in a kind of dance instead of simply using brute force to see who strikes first—these are behaviors that you don't see very often, even in modern productions.
Once again, they feel like living beings; it feels as if there were a much more aggressive ecosystem than we are used to, but nevertheless functional, something that is not far from reality if we consider the fact of the enormous wounds that the tyrannosaurs have and the fossil record, and The Lost World is an excellent example of this. Of course, even at the end of the film, the action focuses more on the enormous eloquence of having a sauropod roaming through London, but even there the animal feels like an animal; it is scared, it is curious, it tries not to step on people, it hurts itself and backs away, and at one point it is even scared enough to cause a bridge to collapse and simply swim away.
However, there's one detail that must always be remembered: despite incorporating behaviors of real animals, these creatures we're seeing are no longer considered dinosaurs. They were once, but now they have a much more monstrous silhouette, more akin to a primitive dragon than a real animal, no matter what we try to say. And the truth is, even with these limitations, they still feel like real animals. Imagine the Megatherium, a kind of giant sloth that lived during the Ice Age. Imagine an entire ecosystem teeming with them, moving slowly due to their cold blood, yet quite active from time to time, as if they had bursts of energy and could perform the feats we see in the film.
Ironically, as I said, this type of vision was quite common in antiquity, and there is no better way to see this than through these paintings of what were considered in Victorian times to be antediluvian dragons.
While this approach is much more brutal than the one I described earlier, the truth is that even back then, these animals were considered to be quite slow reptiles. Furthermore, considering that the Komodo dragon is the largest living reptile, and despite its generally slow movement, it can occasionally reach impressive speeds in a very short time, it wouldn't surprise me if an entire ecosystem of these creatures could arise. There's something about its very nature that simply tells you it's plausible. Perhaps it's its simplicity, or perhaps the fact that it closely resembles animals we know today, but the mere thought of such a scene doesn't seem so far-fetched. In fact, I can more or less imagine something similar to this in the Permian or Triassic periods.
But going back to the larger dinosaurs, what I like most about them is the fact that they no longer feel like dinosaurs, but rather like their own distinct thing, that is, like a creature independent of the others. And in this case, I think there are two examples that I quite like. The first is one that I already talked about in my main profile: Ray Bradbury's story, "A Sound of Thunder."
This is my favorite image representing the story, not only because of the technological style that reflects the era in which the story was written, but also because of how the Tyrannosaurus is portrayed. The book describes it in a very particular way, not so much as a real animal, but more as a monster with black eyes and no expression whatsoever, its mouth constantly open and salivating, its neck coiled upon itself, and a nose similar to a snake with long, albeit weak, arms with claws to grab people. In some illustrations, it's even given three fingers, the third being a kind of thumb, and a robust rope that looked like a kind of swaying log, towering over several trees in the forest. I find it a brutal sight, and it's a shame that many productions of the time couldn't or didn't portray dinosaurs in such a monstrous way. In any case, I find it impressive to imagine; it's one of those things where if you make it too monstrous but still resemble a real animal, it loses its charm. But at this point, Alberto de This way of understanding that this creature, although it may look like a monster, is still an animal that was simply wandering around until it encountered time travelers, seems brutal to me. It's a scene I could only imagine in a Carnivores video game, and even then it's difficult to emulate.
And finally we come to another of my favorite old-school productions, one that I feel bad trying to defend because it's full of racism and misogyny, but I'm undoubtedly part of that club of people who say 1933 King Kong is a great movie.
Once again, the novelization goes into more detail about King Kong's enemy, the Meat-Eater, and the truth is that it's quite different from what we see in the film. This is because both the book and the original screenplay only vaguely described the creature that the crew would face, whether it was a kind of sea serpent or a meat-eater. I find this quite curious, since what they did afterward was look for the dummy that most resembled the creature described in the book or the screenplay. In this case, the Meat-Eater in the book is described as having a long neck, long arms, and an elongated snout, somewhat similar to a Baryonyx, rather than anything else. However, despite everything, the distinctive image of the Meat-Eater fighting Kong is one that has remained immortalized over time, especially in my mind. This image, as I said, seems like it's from another world, the jungle is incredibly dense, and you can even compare it to the height of the creatures, noticing how tall they are. In real life, a creature of that size wouldn't even fit in a jungle, let alone the Amazon, and yet we can observe how massive the trees are.
I think that's another thing that works in favor of this type of imagery that I like so much: the ecosystem itself, the flora, the plants. Because for an ecosystem to sustain these kinds of creatures, the plants must also be extreme, enormous, gigantic, and also aggressive enough. It's a kind of scenery that is rarely evoked again, especially since in modern paleo art, prehistoric Earth is treated more as simply our planet Earth, but with some differences. Whereas even during the dinosaur renaissance in the seventies, Earth was already portrayed as just that, simply planet Earth, but with dinosaurs on it, closer to home, as seen in Walking with Dinosaurs.
Although I wouldn't say I miss this kind of prehistoric aesthetic, since I'm talking about a nostalgia I didn't even experience, it's still something that impresses me and I miss it in modern representations. I'd like to see at least a balance found between modern and ancient representations to bring back this kind of spectacularity.
In a time where the world was ruled by Terrible Lizards.
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