It features 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.

They are forced to the mainland by a catastrophic meteor 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.

Several years later, a fully grown Aladar watches the lemurs take part in a mating ritual, in which Plio's awkward teenage brother Zini fails to find a female.

After encountering the callous Iguanodon herd leader Kron, they retreat to the end of the line, and befriend the old Styracosaurus Eema, her pet Ankylosaurus Url, and her equally elderly friend Baylene, a Brachiosaurus.

The rest of the herd follows suit, and Kron's sister Neera, impressed by Aladar's compassion, begins to grow closer to him.

Ushering the herd away from the lake, Kron deliberately leaves Aladar, the lemurs, the elderly dinosaurs, and the injured Bruton behind, hoping that they will slow their pursuers down.

After founding his own namesake studio, special effects artist Phil Tippett directed Prehistoric Beast (1984), an experimental animated short film in which a Centrosaurus is stalked by a Tyrannosaurus.

"[7][9] Verhoeven was excited at the idea and suggested an approach inspired by Shane (1953) in which "you follow a lead character through a number of situations and moving from a devastated landscape into a promised land.

After Woot defeats Grozni in a final fight, the film would end with the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, which would ultimately result in the death of the dinosaurs.

However, Katzenberg called Smith to help on Honey, I Blew Up the Kid (1992) in which he was replaced by David W. Allen, who had just finished directing Puppet Master II (1990).

[13][14] The filmmakers then approached then-Disney CEO Michael Eisner about not knowing how much the project would cost or how long it would take to finish, but that they could fully complete it.

[17] The story dealt with Noah, who had the ability to see visions of the future, foreseeing the coming of an asteroid and struggling to guide a herd of other dinosaurs to safety.

Most of the computers were used from Silicon Graphics and additional machines were installed to create a render farm in order to provide workstations for artists, software engineers, and technical directors.

[20] Headed by David Womersley, live-action photography units shot on actual jungle, beach, and desert locations including California, Florida, Hawaii, Australia, Jordan, Venezuela, and Samoa.

In order to approximate a dinosaur's perspective, visual effects supervisor Neil Krepela invented the "Dino-cam", in which a camera was rigged on a cable suspended between two 72-foot (22 m)-tall towers.

[20][14] On February 26, 1998, while filming live-action footage in Poison Canyon near Trona, San Bernardino County, California, a crew member was killed and another seriously wounded when a camera boom struck a cross-country power line.

[25] In September 1999, it was reported that pop singer/songwriter Kate Bush had written and recorded a song for the film to be used in the scene in which Aladar and his family mourn the destruction of their island.

One track, "The Egg Travels", was heard in many trailers following the film's release, including Lilo & Stitch (2002), The Wild Thornberrys Movie (2002), and Around the World in 80 Days (2004).

To promote the release of Dinosaur, the Animal Kingdom theme park ride "Countdown to Extinction" was renamed after the film,[40] and its plot, which had always prominently featured a Carnotaurus and an Iguanodon, was mildly altered so that the Iguanodon is specifically meant to be Aladar, the film's protagonist, and the plot of the ride is now about the riders traveling through time to a point just before the impact of the meteor that caused the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs, to bring Aladar back to the present and save his life.

[47] For the Collector's Edition version, first disc contained supplemental bonus features, including two audio commentaries: one from directors Ralph Zondag and Eric Leighton and the effects supervisors, and the other from producer Pam Marsden and the animators.

[48] In December 2001, Variety reported it was the fourth best-selling home video release of the year, behind Shrek, How the Grinch Stole Christmas and Pearl Harbor.

[49] On May 16, 2000, Disney Interactive released a video game based on the film on a Microsoft Windows/Mac CD-ROM as part of the Activity Center series.

[51] During its opening weekend, Dinosaur grossed $38.8 million from 3,257 theaters in the United States and Canada, beating out Gladiator and Road Trip to take the number-one spot.

[53] In the UK, Dinosaur grossed $3 million in its opening weekend, topping the box office ahead of Nutty Professor II: The Klumps.

The website's consensus reads, "While Dinosaur's plot is generic and dull, its stunning computer animation and detailed backgrounds are enough to make it worth a look.

[64] On the syndicated television series Roger Ebert & the Movies, the film received two thumbs up with guest host Michaela Pereira from ZDTV's Internet Tonight additionally praising the vocal performances for the characters.

[65] Todd McCarthy of Variety called it "an eye-popping visual spectacle", but later wrote, "somewhere around half-way through, you begin to get used to the film's pictorial wondrousness — to take it for granted, even — and start to realize that the characters and story are exceedingly mundane, unsurprising and pre-programmed.

Those scores of animators and technical advisers have conjured a teeming pre-human world, and the first minutes of the film present it in a swooping, eye-filling panorama."

Summarizing the review, he later wrote that "[t]he reason to see this movie is not to listen to the dinosaurs but to watch them move, to marvel at their graceful necks and clumsy limbs and notice how convincingly they emerge into sunlight or get wet.

"[69] Desson Howe, reviewing for The Washington Post, felt the movie "was somewhat derivative and lacked a narrative arc" and claimed it was too similar to The Land Before Time.