IS `DINOSAUR' LIVE-ACTION? IS IT ANIMATED? EVEN DISNEY ISN'T SURE.

Byline: Glenn Whipp Film Writer

Disney's new computer-animated Jurassic jewel of a movie, ``Dinosaur,'' looks so astoundingly real that it seems to have put the studio's feature animation president, Thomas Schumacher, into a mild state of denial. Ask Schumacher any sort of question that compares ``Dinosaur'' with past Disney animated efforts, and the outgoing executive will wave it off.

``I would suggest that it's not animated,'' Schumacher says. ``It's a big action film coming from the Walt Disney company. This is not what people are used to seeing us do.''

Indeed, ``Dinosaur,'' with its jaw-dropping meshing of computer-generated images and real backgrounds, is a technical breakthrough, even if its story recycles elements from ``Tarzan,'' ``The Lion King'' and the classic John Wayne western ``Red River.'' To create the movie, Disney sank a fortune into turning the old Lockheed Skunk Works development lab in Burbank (it's where the stealth bomber was created) into a state-of-the-art digital facility that the studio is already using on nearly a dozen other projects.

``We had to make a movie and build an animation facility at the same time,'' producer Pam Marsden says. ``We tried not to think about it that way, though,'' adds co-producer Baker Bloodworth. ``Otherwise, our heads would have popped off.''

And there was plenty of time for that. When Marsden came on board the project in 1994, the technology to make the movie didn't even exist. Her job, which began as a six-month assignment and lasted six-plus years, was to find out if it was even possible to tell a feature-length story using computer-generated dinosaurs. (``This was before `Toy Story' came out,'' Marsden says. ``We knew we could create the images, but we didn't know if we could create characters that could act.'')

``Dinosaur's'' days at Disney actually date back to 1988, when the studio purchased a screenplay by ``Wild Bunch'' writer Walon Green that was intended to be a ``Godzilla''-style buddy picture. Director Paul Verhoeven (``Starship Troopers'') and stop-motion genius Phil Tippett were attached for a time, but the project languished until it moved over to feature animation.

Once Marsden's test proved a success, she took her results to Disney chairman Michael Eisner. After comparing the digital dinosaurs against computer-generated backgrounds and miniature backgrounds, she was certain that the creatures would play best in photo-real settings. The problem was, in 1996, nobody had ever done anything like that before.

Eisner OK'd the capital investment in a new digital animation facility, the Secret Lab (the name is more of a nod to Disney's legendary furtiveness than to the building's Lockheed roots), a move he says is designed to continue ``the culture and heritage which stands for the name Disney.'' Eisner's one demand: The dinosaurs in the movie had to talk. (The creative team held the line when it came to singing and dancing, however.)

The filmmakers sent crews to Australia, Venezuela, Jordan, Samoa, Hawaii, the Mojave desert and the Los Angeles Arboretum to shoot the varied landscapes featured in the movie. From there, the filmmakers enhanced the backdrops and inserted the dinosaurs, a painstaking integration process that required some 900 animators, most of whom had to be trained in the art.

``We labored over every frame of this movie, making sure the lighting and the compositing looked as real as possible,'' says Ralph Zondag, who co-directed the movie with fellow Glendale resident Eric Leighton. ``In many cases, we were learning as we went along, and in the five years we spent on the movie, we made some technological leaps on the computer that made things a lot easier than when we started.''

``Everything we used will probably be obsolete in two years,'' Leighton says, laughing (ruefully?). ``That's how fast the technology is moving. Hopefully, though, the movie will hold up like, say, `King Kong' did.''

Nobody is saying exactly how much money Disney spent building the studio and making the film. Given the extraordinary start-up and training costs, ``Dinosaur'' is certainly the most expensive animated movie in history. One source pegs the cost at $200 million, not including the vast expenditures for the new animation facility. Suffice it to say, the studio needs to sell a vast number of tickets to recoup its costs.

This being Disney, that shouldn't be too tall an order. While other studios struggle to sell their big-ticket animated movies to audiences (Fox, DreamWorks and Warner Bros. have pretty spotty track records), Disney continues to enjoy hit after hit. Schumacher says the studio's formula is pretty simple: It's the story, stupid.

``People are choosing the movie they want to go to, not the genre they want to see,'' Schumacher says. ``So you can make an animated movie like `Pokemon' and then you can spend many more times that making a movie like the one that just came out (`The Road to El Dorado') and nobody went. Why is one successful and the other not? The story has got to pull people in.''

``Dinosaur's'' story is vintage Disney, a mixture of up-with-people humanism and zany comic schtick. And while the dinosaurs are pretty realistic, directors Zondag and Leighton admit they took certain liberties with the main reptilian, an iguanodon named Aladar.

``We cheated a lot to make him much more bifocal, taking the mouth and moving it closer to the eyes,'' Leighton says.

``It's basically dino-horse,'' Zondag adds. ``Because when you think of a horse, you think of a certain nobility and strength. And we thought, if we're going to make an herbivore our lead, we've got to find a shape that symbolically gives the audience a sense of nobility.''

Herbivores usually don't receive top billing in dinosaur movies, playing second fiddle to those flesh-eating tyrannosaur terrors. In ``Dinosaur,'' the T-rex is absent, replaced by a close second cousin, the carnotaur, who, much like a character in a Tarantino movie, seems to kill just for the fun of it.

``The T-rex has been done to death,'' Leighton says. ``There are so many dinosaurs to choose from, we wanted to explore some new territory.''

The carnotaurs' mayhem also brought ``Dinosaur'' into some new territory for Disney - PG country. Most of the carnage is implied rather than seen, but there are enough frights to give some parents pause for concern.

``I'd say it's OK for any child 5 years and older,'' producer Marsden says.

Adds Leighton: ``We didn't want to scare our entire audience out of the theaters, but at the same time, we're dealing with realistic-looking dinosaurs and with that, there's the assumption that you're going to see some aggression. Besides, when you think of dinosaurs, you think of big teeth. We had to have a little fun.''

Schumacher calls the PG rating entirely appropriate, but he doesn't think ``Dinosaur'' is much more intense than ``Tarzan'' or ``The Lion King.''

``It's all about your kid,'' Schumacher says. ``(Miramax co-chairman) Harvey Weinstein went to the premiere of `Tarzan' and the next day he calls me and says, `Boy, I loved the movie, but it was too intense for my daughter. You guys went too far with this one.' And I said, `Harvey, in your movies, you blow people's brains up all over the windshields.' So, like I said, it depends on your sensibility.''

CAPTION(S):

6 photos

Photo: (1 -- 2 -- cover -- color) DINOVISION

Modern technology brings prehistoric past to animated life

(3) A brachiosaur named Baylene towers over a group that includes Aladar (an iguanodon), Eema (a styrachosaur) and Url (an anklysaur) in ``Dinosaur.''

(4) Iguanodons Aladar, left, and Neera, along with their lemur companions, find abundance, hope and a new beginning in Disney's latest epic, playing citywide.'

(5) A pair of bloodthirsty carnotaurs provides a constant threat to a herd of migrating dinosaurs.

(6) Thirsty dinosaurs endure a difficult trek across the arid desert as they search for their nesting grounds in ``Dinosaur.''