Dinosaur

Dinosaur is a 2000 American live-action animated adventure film directed by Ralph Zondag and Eric Leighton and written by John Harrison, Robert Nelson Jacobs, and Walon Green. Produced by Walt Disney Feature Animation and The Secret Lab, it stars the voices of D. B. Sweeney, Alfre Woodard, Ossie Davis, Max Casella, Hayden Panettiere, Samuel E. Wright, Julianna Margulies, Peter Siragusa, Joan Plowright, and Della Reese. The film follows a young Iguanodon who was adopted and raised by a family of lemurs on a tropical island. They are forced to the mainland by a catastrophic meteorite impact; setting out to find a new home, they join a herd of dinosaurs heading for the "Nesting Grounds", but must contend with the group's harsh leader, as well as external dangers such as predatory Carnotaurus.

The initial idea was conceived in 1986 by Phil Tippett and Paul Verhoeven, which they conceived as a darker, naturalistic film about dinosaurs. The project underwent numerous iterations with multiple directors attached. In 1994, Walt Disney Feature Animation began development on the project and spent several years developing the software to create the dinosaurs. While the characters in Dinosaur are computer-generated, most of the backgrounds are live-action and were filmed on location. A number of backgrounds were found in various continents such as the Americas and Asia; various tepuis and Angel Falls also appear in the film. With a budget of $127.5 million, Dinosaur was reportedly the most expensive computer-animated film at the time. Dinosaur is also the first film from Walt Disney Feature Animation to be 3D animated.