Prehistoric Beast

"Prehistoric Beast" is a twelve minutes long experimental animated film fully conceived and made by Phil Tippett in 1983. Being made with the so called stop 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 in April 1985.

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 yet 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.

ee also

* Dinosaur!
* Dinosaur

External links

* [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0471344/ IMDB page for "Prehistoric Beast"]
* [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0439543/ IMDB page for "Dinosaur!"]