'Dinosaur' broke this year's U.S box-office record for strongest movie opening when it opened at USD$38.6 million. Mind you, this was before it was upstaged by 'Mission: Impossible 2' which opened at USD$71.8 million. Anyway, to get back to the warm-blooded lizards, 'Dinosaur' is an animated movie about…do I really have to tell you?… which used 45 terabytes of disc space, 30,000 processing hours per week, 70,000 lines of code to produced it. Wow! Aren't you salivating at the prospects of seeing state of the art graphics already?

'Dinosaur' is directed by Eric Leighton and Ralph Zondag. The final screenplay is by John Harrison and Robert Nelson Jacobs, based upon an earlier screenplay by Walon Green. It stars the voices of D.B. Sweeney, Alfre Woodard, Ossie Davis, Max Casella, Julianna Marguiles, Joan Plowright, Della Reese.

'Dinosaur' starts out with scenes of various species of dinosaurs grazing peacefully in a meadow. Suddenly, a fearsome carnivorous predator, the T-Rex comes stomping out of the jungle and wrecks mayhem as the other dinosaurs run for their lives. The T-Rex proceeds to run down and kill a smaller dinosaur. In the aftermath, a lone egg gets scooped up by a dinosaur that looks like a chicken, which proceeds to lose the egg. The egg then goes through a series of near-mishaps before landing safely into a tribe of lemurs. Yar (Ossie Davis), the leader of the lemurs and his mate Plio (Alfre Woodard), raises the hatchling Aladar (D.B. Sweeney) to a peaceful and fun-filled adulthood.

Suddenly, disaster strikes. A meteorite storm virtually destroys everything around them and the survivors decide to make a trek to a nesting ground, hoping that its still viable as a new habitat. Kron (Samuel E. Wright), the leader of the herd and his lieutenant, Bruton (Owen Klatte) pushes the herd to a forced march through a desert, leaving the weak and sick behind. Neera (Julianna Marguiles), sister of Kron, is Aladar's love interest, much to the annoyance of her dominating brother.

The villains here come in the form of a pair of carnotaurs, a nastier variation of our favorite predator, the T-Rex. The humor? Well, an elderly stegosaurus Eema (Della Reese), an old brontosaurus called Baylene (Joan Plowright), the love monkey Zini (Max Casella) plus scores of Aladar's friends provide the friendship and humorous support here.

Initially, 'Dinosaur' looked like a movie that was at least promising in terms of graphics and visuals. After watching it, I was stunned. Why? You may ask. The answer is, superb story build-up, incredible vista and scenery, heart-pumping action, great humor, wonderful sound effects, the list goes on….. The plot is simple and easy to absorb, the various types of dinosaurs including stegosauruses, brontosauruses, raptors and so on simply awesome to watch. The dialogue is smooth, easy to understand and filled with the occasional gag.

The CGIs, quite simply an amazing achievement in animation graphics. I mean, they look so real!! It's not as terrifying as 'Jurassic Park: The Lost World' but all in all, 'Dinosaur' provides enough of a package of stunning visuals and incredible sound effects to make this movie a more than worthwhile watch. This has got to be one of the best animations I have ever seen!!!