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Prehistoric Beast

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Prehistoric Beast is a twelve minutes long experimental animated film fully conceived and made by Phil Tippett in 1983. This sequence is considered as being the first film produced by the Tippett Studio, founded by Tippett himself in 1984. Being made with the so called go motion animation technique Prehistoric Beast prior served to Phil Tippet to make special effects sequences for the 1985 full length documentary Dinosaur!, first aired on CBS in the United States on November 5 1985.[1].

Content

This short film depicts the chase and predation of a Monoclonius by a Tyrannosaurus.

Prelude of a full length documentary

Prehistoric Beast was only released in specialized animation festivals, but it convinced Robert Guenette and Steven Paul Mark to request Tippett's skills in order to transform it in a full length documentary. They then asked Tippet to realise new sequences with other dinosaur species, and the Prehistoric Beast material was added to the new one, resulting on Dinosaur! in 1985. Tippett had already participated in The Empire Strikes Back (1981), animating the tauntauns seen in the movie, and his experimental work on Prehistoric Beast and Dinosaur! served to the animated dinosaurs sequences he made some years later for Jurassic Park (1993).

Trivia

  • In the 1933 movie King Kong a Stegosaurus attacks the movie characters and after having killed it by gun fire one of the characters identifies it as being "a dinosaur, a prehistoric beast". An excerpt from this scene is shown in the final 1985 documentary Dinosaur!, as a reference to Prehistoric Beast, the short sequence by which it was preceded.

References

See also