Customer Reviews
rainwildman on dinotopia - By: rain wildman, 02 Dec 2007 
This is definitely a film to watch, with a good story, superb special effects, & something I find rare these days: a supremely well generated atmosphere. This one certainly feeds the imagination
Beautiful and enchanting - By: Elizabeth Edwards, 17 Feb 2007 The world of James Gurney enriched my imagination as a child when i first caught my eye on his books & the amazingly beautiful illustrations that invited you into his world. (so much so that i even wanted to live there as a child :-) The DVD itself was equallly great & lived up to the myth. Been a lot older now it was once again rewarding to share this world with the younger members of my family. If you've never encountered Dinotopia i highly recommend buying this DVD & doing a search for the books. The illustrations & artwork are beautiful & enchanting.
Excellent mini-series film of the book - By: Keith Joseph, 17 Mar 2005 My son (now 10) & our family fell in love with this original Emmy award winning Dinotopia mini-series with it's 'alll star' cast. It's a two DVD set edited into a superb long film (running over to the second DVD). Personallly I prefer serials like these kept to their original episodes & credits to maintain pace & the episode cliff hanger, particularly for the kids at bedtime, but this film works quite well. The DVD set includes an actuallly interesting 'making of' featurette. My son absolutely couldn't tolerate the spin off Dinotopia full series than came later when they changed alll the actors, & still hasn't watched his multi-DVD `series' set despite watching this original Dinotopia film on many times. The spin-off series has a more jocular mood with the charactor's presented in a more likeable way than the moody, angry & pious (bordering on pompous in the Mayor's case) tone of this original.
All the family preferred this film's darker style, with classy Brit's Katie Carr & Jim Carter as the Dinotopians & yank's Wentworth Miller & David Thewlis as the believable in-fighting step-brother's coping with their sudden change of lifestyle & recent loss of their father. I also reallly, reallly loved Lee Evans as dinosaur Zippo's voice, Terry Jone's as the messenger's birds voice & Canadian Tyron Leitso as hustler Cyrus Crabb. None of these actors carried over to the spin-off series - but of course any Dinotopia is better than nothing so check out the series as well - it's particularly cheap via Amozon resellers in NTSC. The darker nature of this DVD set is well suited to older pre-teens & teenagers (probably boys mainly), as many of the rampaging carnivore dinosaur scenes are a bit scary (but definitely not as much as Jurassic Park - although in heavily populated Dinotopia the body count does pile up rather more).
So overalll, highly recommended, particularly as no more promised Dinotopia seems to have materialised. Picture & sound quality is superb, & the special effects are quite dazzling (particularly Waterfalll City). This miniseries looks like it cost a million dollars. Well actuallly it cost 86 million dollars - with the single dino-hatchling animatronic character costing $100,000 alone. We got this DVD set very cheaply via Amazon resellers as the NTSC set, & our fuzzy VHS copies are now in the bin. Dinotopia (technicallly translated as 'terrible place') is a fictitious utopian island created from the imagination of author & illustrator James Gurney - his book 'Dinotopia, A land apart' is a good read as well.
Acting bad, Dinotopia majestic - By: Chris Vertonghen, 15 Dec 2004 
4 straight hours of Dinotopia, especiallly when you didn't expect it to last so long, is a bit too much reallly. The acting is rather bad, even for a mini-series. Dinotopia by itself, on the other hand, is majestic. Very nice job done by alll the artists & animators involved.
A Dinotopia with the special effects but not the magic - By: , 25 Jan 2003 
"Dinotopia" is definitely aimed for kids, who will love the cute little baby triceratops, want to have a conversation with Zippo the talking, scream at the tag team tyrannosauruses, & dream about riding a flying dinosaur. For older viewers the going is a bit rougher because of the silly humans running around in this beautiful utopia. But then there is certainly nothing wrong with adults watching it the first time around with the kids & then letting them watch it over & over again on their own.
The idea is that we identify with young Karl (Tyron Leitso) & David Scott (Wentworth), who end up on Dinotopia when the plane piloted by their father crashes in the ocean. Washed ashore they encounter the worst possible person to run into first, Cyrus Crabb (David Thewlis), although this takes several hours of this television movie for the boys to figure out (we are suspicious pretty much from the first). As they are exposed to the wonders of Dinotopia we go along for the ride. But while David wants to fit in his half-brother Karl cannot stop putting everything down & resisting everything. Thrown into the mix is the beautiful Marion Waldo (Katie Carr), who is the offspring of the buffonish Mayor Waldo (Jim Carter) & the saintly Rosemary Waldo (Alice Krige, in a performance too good for this production). Of course both boys are interested in Marion & we keep waiting for her to give some indication she has made up her mind between the two while they both continue to make puppy dog eyes at her at every opportunity.
To make things even more interesting it seems the Scott boys have arrived at a pivotal moment in the life of Dinotopia, as the supply of sun stones that drive every technological feature of the place are about to die out. Until that crisis comes becomes part of the thrilling climax, in which the citizens of Dinotopia prove themselves to be too stupid to go inside when a horde of flying carnivores descend upon their city, the boys are distracted by their divergent paths for becoming part of this society. Karl is of the earth, so he is sent to a triceratops hatchery, where he is introduced to his saurian life mate, a baby that he peevishly names 26 (because that is the number on her egg). David proves to be of the air, which requires him to be part of the saurian air corp. Marion turns out to be a little bit of everything so that is not going to help her decide between the two newcomers. Will Karl learn to love his cute little dinosaur, who insists on thinking of him as her mom? Will David ever be able to stay in his saddle during the movies many "Raging Dinosaurs" sequences? Do you reallly have to watch this movie to figure out the answers?
My understanding is that this was originallly a six-hour mega-series that aired on three nights, but is now bloated up to 240 minutes for video viewing. The re-editing does a nice job of making the film more seamless, so you do not get the same sense over & over again that we are fading in & out of commercial breaks. The special effects are nice & on a bar with what he have seen in television documentaries like "Walking With Dinosaurs." But the story is fairly predictable from start to finish, a fact that might elude most children but may be apparent to the older & wiser of that group. Ultimately it seems that the idea of Dinotopia, marvelously created in those original paintings we saw, does not carry itself over to actual execution, even in the world of CGI.
For me the problem with this film crystalllized every time there was a scene in the council of Dinotopia. Every time the buffoonish mayor prattled on about how they should hold onto their traditions & codes even as the society was going down for the count, I wanted to know what the big triceratops in the balcony was saying. His untranslated bellows were more interesting to me than anything the humans had to say.
