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It’s hard to overstate just how fantastic Walking with Dinosaurs truly is, or the lasting impact that it has had upon the educational documentary genre. Before this, by and large, the educational specials about dinosaurs recycled footage from cheesy b-movies, offered cheap animation, highlighted complete skeletons, sketches of what they looked like and featured numerous talking heads detailing their possible behaviors, life spans, diets. Dinosaurs decided to take the current information and theories (as of 1999 when it premiered originally), and bring them to a more authentic life. Taking the conceit that you could go out into the wilderness and shoot, say, a lion in its natural environment and applying it to these prehistoric behemoths, Dinosaurs makes for some wildly fantastic viewing.
A problem that would plague the series in this and each of the sequels was the feeling that one is watching mostly speculation and plausibility and not entirely scientifically accurate information. But that curiosity is probably entirely the point. So little can be completely known and signed off on their behavior or appearance that a certain amount of guess-work is always called for and taken into account. But at times the creatures seem to be moving around so that the camera has something dynamic to look at while it observes these animals going about their daily life. Did some of these dinosaurs really eliminate waste this way, or did it just make an animator laugh and remained in? Who knows, but it doesn’t detract much from the series as a whole.
The greatest strength is normalizing dinosaur behavior, taking them away from the smashing and roaring giant monsters of old and having them instead displaying normal animal patterns of groupings, child-rearing and day-to-day activities. The brutality of life is shown in full bloom. These animals kill for survival, fight with others over territories or alpha-male standing in a herd, but generally they’re seen wandering from place to place or spending a significant amount of time playing in the wild, eating, drinking and taking care of their young. These aren’t the fantastic monstrous animals of my youthful imaginings but flesh-and-blood creatures trying to survive in the wild.
It’s a neat hat trick, at once making us believe that these dinosaurs are really there being filmed and yet looking unlike anything we’ve ever actually seen in our daily life. For some reason the aquatic episode is the one that stuck in my mind the longest. It’s the most successful in terms of creating realistic effects work. It uses more puppets than computer generated images and the results are highly impressive. It’s also because the aquatic animals during the time of the dinosaurs typically play second-fiddle to the well-known ones like T-Rex, triceratops, or any of the flying predatory flying birds.
Documentaries, especially ones specifically made for educational purposes, are hard to pull off. If the balance isn’t right they feel too dry or too dipped in tabloid-like vagaries passing themselves off as truths. But Dinosaurs manages to not only entertain and inform adult audiences, but children also seem to be big fans of this material. It works on numerous levels, and the best works accomplish this feat with a sense of ease and skill. Dinosaurs is one of those rare television accomplishments.
