This short animated film differs from many other dinosaur films in using outmoded representations of the creatures for its source rather than the more accurate depictions we have today. The first modellings of dinosaurs were crude and often very inaccurate, to a degree that the earliest renderings now have a naive charm of their own, like the hearsay depictions of African animals or Egyptian monuments.
Antediluvian has an additional attraction in its unintended resemblance to Roland Topor’s designs for René Laloux’s Fantastic Planet. Topor’s snapping, shrieking fauna are just as vicious as the outmoded saurians while being rendered in an equally naive style. All that Antediluvian requires is some suitably alien flora to push it into Topor-land, or at least the planet next door.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Les Temps Morts by René Laloux
That was a fun watch, especially for an old dinosaur fan like me. I was a dino-crazy kid back in the 1960s, and even the dinosaurs I grew up reading about scarcely exist any longer, much less the Victorian ones! The “Jurassic Park” franchise initially went with updated models, for the times, but I don’t think even the producers of AI blockbusters are embracing our “new” feathered Tyrannosaurs.
I imagine the contemporary Hollywood dinosaur is going to persist as a cinematic cliché regardless of scientific opinion, the same way that spaceships on screen still make loads of noise in the vacuum of space. Ingrained habits are hard to break.