Customer Reviews

Walking With Prehistoric Beasts

5 star:		(41)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

WOW!! This is one of the most amazing documentaries on prehistoric life I've ever seen (and I've seen a lot of documentaries on prehistoric life)!

Walking With Prehistoric Beasts starts off 50 million years ago, just a few million years after the extincion of the dinosaurs. In the beginning of the show, the narrator introduces the small mammal called Leptictidium, a swift six foot tall bird called Gastronis, and other beasts. after on, the documentary shows a primitive whale that was 30 tons and four times the length of a great white shark, the planet's largest predatory land mammal (which is interestingly enough related to ungulates like sheep and goats), a two story tall rhino which was the largest land mammal ever on earth, a nasty scavenging hog (one of the most fearsome and ugly creatures in the show), and several other weird, fearsome, and magnificent beasts that once ruled the earth. Later in the documentary, the ice age comes, as well as an amazing and somewhat hairless ape... Man.

I could go on and on talking about this show, but I won't :-). Let me sumarise this amazing five star documentary to you, the reader, in three words: BUY IT NOW!!

The Walking with Dinosaurs team could probably have contented itself with producing spinoffs for a long time. They made one special -- "Allosaurus" -- which basically seems to be a seventh episode that didn't get included in the earlier series. If they went on producing half-hour dinosaur shows for years, they'd have had me for an audience.

They didn't do that, though. Instead they traded on their success with dinos to make this great series about prehistoric animals after the dinosaurs. One of the producers mentions, in the "making of" documentary on disk two, that they knew they'd have to do the dinosaurs first because those were popular enough to draw money and attention. They seem to have made "Beasts" because they were just plain interested. Thank goodness someone's letting curiosity drive the work, you know?

This series works a lot like "Walking with Dinosaurs" did. There are six episodes, and each one's a storyline involving a particular species of animal and the world in which it lives. There's no "talking head" side to these shows; they're nonstop film of the (animated) animals living in their worlds, without other graphics. Kenneth Branagh narrates them very much like any other animal documentary, only you're seeing reconstructions of extinct animals instead of lions or elephants. The camera work is skilfully made to work like shots from modern nature shows, with a few minor conceits from the cgi animators thrown in for fun.

The "Walking" team really raised the bar for themselves here, though. First, for some reason prehistoric mammals don't knock people out the way dinosaurs do. A couple of years ago a Japanese team announced it was trying to produce a real, live mammoth, but nobody's making movies in which a series of ... scientists get lured out to an island for mammoths to stomp on them, you know? Then too, people know how a lion or tiger looks when it moves, so animating a saber toothed cat is going to be harder to pull off, leaving alone the primates. Also, and it's a simple thing, mammals have hair, which is hard to make right on a computer.

Well, it works again. The shows are wonderfully written, with an extremely good sense of timing and a nice range to each episode. The animals are stunning. Seeing a brontotherium browsing the shrubs is just dazzling. There's almost more evolutionary interest to this one, too, because we're seeing lots of animals that have modern relations. Glyptodonts, car-sized armadillo relations, are a kick to see bumbling around in company with giant ground sloths and smilodon, the largest saber tooth.

The shortcomings of Beasts are pretty similar to those of Dinosaurs. A couple of more typical documentaries on the second disk make up for the lack of hard core paleontology. The payoff of the documentary approach is worth underplaying the material you can find in more traditional programs and books. There might be a little less money behind this than the earlier show; the worlds we see are a little less lushly populated, with a handful of highlighted species the only ones we see. My only real reservation, though, would be that the complexity of human origins suffers. That's one story I don't think you can gloss over the scientific debate for... maybe another entire series would really be better.

So, what I'm asking for is more. Another series, please. And I trust you to stretch yourselves, out of curiosity, to give us something even better.

and the Woolly Mammoth. But how about the Leptictidium? A tiny early mammal. A tiny meat eater the size of a cat, who has to keep clear of the top predator of her time, the Gastornis, a flightless bird as big as a man and just as hungry!
Or how about the Andrewsarchus, a five meter long wolf-like creature with bone crunching jaws over three feet long and related to the whale. In fact it BECAME the whales!
This is a two DVD set. The first holds six amazing episodes about six different periods of Earth's history, from right after the death of the dinosaurs to just before man starts to rule the planet. The second holds lots of fun extras: interviews, TWO 50 minute long behind-the-scene featurettes, photos, fact files and even storyboards.
Really helps fill in that space between dinosaurs and us. A must for any DVD library!

The team that brought you Walking With Dinosaurs brings you look at the world from time not long after the dinosaurs were extinct until just a few thousand years ago. Since I was reasonably familiar with dinosaurs already, this new series was a lot more informative for me.

We see a world where giant birds hunt cat-sized horses, where a pig is the meanest thing on the block, where the ancestor of sheep was a carnivore, where whales had teeth and attitude. We learn that there was really no such animal as a sabre-tooth "tiger," but there a large variety of sabre-tooth cats.

Technically, the team has progressed significantly, as the effects are, on the whole, much more realistic. Given that most of animals have hair now, this is a real accomplishment. There were a few moments when things didn't look real, and they had to do mostly with the early humans (austrailopithicus). These looked a little phony compared to the others, although they looked better on DVD than they did when I first watched this show on the Discovery channel.

Just an aside, was I the only one, when the tribe of pre-humans was driven away from their watering hole, who expected to see a 2001 monolith teaching them how to kill things with bones?

The only downside I found was the fact that there really wasn't enough room to adequately tell the human story, and many stages of human evolution where left out. I kind of wish they had left the humans out altogether and done a third special, "Walking with Early Humans," or something like that.

The narration by Kenneth Branaugh is, as before, superior to the American actor they hired to redub the show for the Discovery Channel, although Stockard Channing was a lot better than Avery Brooks. Why do they feel the need to redo the narration for American television? It's not like Branaugh isn't famous over here. He's sure a lot better known than Avery Brooks.

As usual, there are good supporting documentaries on the second disk. This time, these have more to do with the science involved than the production. Again, just like with "Dinosaurs," these extras are filled with as much sly good humor as good information.

Another simply amazing documentary series from the BBC. This one definitely lives up to its predecessor- Walking with Dinosaurs, which was the first series to combine breathtaking digital effects with great scientific research and analysis, to create a lost world of creatures and times long gone. Walking with Prehistoric Beasts is actually just a continuation of where Walking with Dinosaurs left off, it begins right after the massive dinosaur extinction and ends during the ice age and the dawn of man. It looks mainly at the rise of mammals and the changing environment and earth. Some of the highlights of the series include: the first whales that actually walked on land, flightless carnivorous birds which were descendants of the dinosaurs, packs of saber-tooth cats killing and mating, huge pig like creatures that bully other carnivores, the first apes to walk on two legs, elephant ancestors that are four times bigger and really angry, herds of wooly mammoths, and much much more. And the computer graphics in this series may even rival that of Walking with Dinosaurs. The scenes and animals almost always look breathtaking and incredibly natural. Sometimes it was seriously hard to believe that these weren't real living animals. And all the sound effects matched everything perfectly, bringing it all to life. Also the music score is terrific, it really takes you on a great auditory journey along with the superb visuals. This series has brought to life a world that you could only imagine before and it does it with serious style, just like its predecessor.

The 6 episode series alone packs a serious punch, but the DVD includes two 50-minute behind-the-scenes featurettes, along with some other goodies. The first featurette discusses how we know what we do about the ancient mammals, the second focuses on the evolution of man from ape and also looks at the Neanderthal briefly. Both featurettes contain informative interviews with scientists as well as behind-the scenes footage of the making of Walking with Prehistoric Beasts, and are very nice additions to an already excellent and worthwhile purchase. There are also interviews with the creators of the series, as well as fact files about the different ancient beasts (really cool), and the usual photo gallery and storyboards. You know it's exceptionally good, when you've watched all 300 minutes on the DVD in one sitting and still want more. I just hope this isn't the last we see of the "Walking With" series...

I really LOVED "Walking with Prehistoric Beasts," and cannot recommend this documentary enough! This show will appeal to fans of nature documentaries who would like to view a researched but (fictional) account of the lives of ancient mammals. This series starts off at about 65 million years ago with the demise of the dinosaurs, and ends about 30 million years ago, with the demise of the Neanderthals. The animation and animatronics are so well done, so detailed that at times I forgot I was watching computer animation and animatronics. In particular, I loved the scenes with the saber-toothed cats, the hyeanadons and the ancient whales. Oh, and who can forget the andrewsarchus?

The narrator does an excellent job of describing each era, the animal life, the flora and fauna, and the climate change and how it impacts the animal populace. Creatures spring to life on the screen eating, drinking, fighting, dying, and yes even (mating).

Caveats: First: I wish the documentary had gone into a bit more detail with early homo sapiens and Neanderthals. I felt the impact of these early humans on their environment wasn't fully explored. Second: About the only scenes I saw where the animation was left than perfect, was where/when the animals fed. The chewing and eating motions didn't seem quite right. The early chimp-like humans were picking nits. But the nits never seemed to quite make it INTO the mouths. Etc.

Finally, one word of caution, while this did not bother me, some sensitive viewers and young children, might have trouble with repeat scenes of graphic violence, and animal death. Even though its animation, it is very realistically portrayed and no punches are pulled. This is not a movie intended for young children( although mature children will love it). As an example: my mother was quite distressed at the scene in the beginning where the trapped baby chick was being devoured alive by the giant ants (!) As a result, she refused to watch anymore.

Overall, an excellent film, sure to delight those who enjoy speculating on what things were like in the world of prehistory.

With the enormous success of "Walking with Dinosaurs", it was only natural that Framestore and the BBC would follow-up that series with the age after the dinosaurs. "Walking with Prehistoric Beasts" is that series. In fact, this is the series that Executive Producer Tim Haines wanted to do, even more than "Walking with Dinosaurs".

My first experience with this series was in London with the episode "Whale Killer". I knew then that this was something I wanted to see when it came across the "pond", and it was something I wanted to buy. It was a little disappointing that Stockard Channing, not Avery Brooks, narrated the Discovery Channel version, but she does a fair job. However, one would be better off buying the video version than taping the series off Discovery.

The video version is the original version that aired in the UK, with Kenneth Branagh's original narration. As with "Walking with Dinosaurs", Branagh's narration is greatly superior to Channing or Brooks', though one has to remember that Branagh isn't working with a script written for a version that is chopped up to accomidate the slighty stricter US censors and commercial time. And the video has the *complete*, uncut episodes from the original BBC airing. The animation continues from "Dinosaurs" and appears just as realistic, despite the added difficulty of rendering fur and feathers!

Although this is a excellent series, there are certain flaws that prevent the series from getting five stars. The animatronics continue to be, IMHO, of a lesser quality than the animation; they still look like rubber puppets. This is perhaps at it's most glaring in the fourth episode, with the early humans. The humans in that episode, despite more than adequate animation, just don't "feel" real, either animated or animatrionic. In fact, in my opinion, the primates featured in this series look more like animated characters than real animals. Only the Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon humans have any semblance of realism, and only because they are portrayed by actors.

The extras featured in the DVD make this series even more worthwhile. Included on the second disc are the two "Making of..." hour-long episodes. Also on the disc are interviews with the creators of the series, stats on the animals featured in the series, and various images of the animals.

All in all, "Walking with Prehistoric Beasts" is an excellent follow-up to "Dinosaurs", despite the technical flaws. Once again, Tim Haines proves why Framestore is to televison what Industrial Light and Magic is to movies. I hope that Haines and company will follow up this series with episodes of the animals from *before* the age of dinosaurs, though, from the previews I've seen, I hold no hope for "Walking with Cavemen"!

I finally got the third instalment of the "walking with" series. I couldn't wait til this film was released on DVD when I caught it on Discovery channel. First let me say that I am glad there are those out there who like to treat the portayal of prehistoric beasts seriously and not as Disney talking characters or Jurassic Park man-eating monsters. The documentary style of Prehistoric Beasts attests to how much the filmmakers value the paleontological finds of recent years. Now is the film %100 accurate in every aspect? No. Is every animated frame perfect with regards to special FX? not really. But as a whole it is a wonderfull learning and entertaining piece. The scenes with the giant rhino ancestors are awe-inspiring. The saber tooth cat comes to life like never before, and of course you have the famous mammoths stumping around the prehistoric badlands. Even those interested in movie FX will want this DVD along with the other 2 in the series as part of their library.

This is the "sequel" to the excellent Walking With Dinosaurs, where the mammals rise from humble beginnings in the post-dino apocalypse to assume many impressive forms, culminating in an advanced ape that climbs to the top of the food chain: us. The entire saga is told in a series of vignettes of some cornerstone species, including mammoths and sabre-tooth cats as well as some lesser known species such as Indricotherium, the largest land mammal ever, and Andrewsarchus a rhino-sized wolf-like animal with hooves.

The computer animation is top rate, but some sequences still don't appear very realistic such as the herd of wooly mammoths being forced off a cliff by a group of Neanderthals. As for the Neanderthals, they seem a bit too much of the caveman cliche. I saw a model recreation at a museum recently that suggests that Neanderthals brow ridge features and noses were much less exagerrated than what is shown here. But these are minor quibbles. This is an excellent way to get both kids and adults interested and informed on mammalian evolution, including human origins. An outstanding entertainment and educational experience awaits!

I thought Walking with Dinosaurs was excellent, but Prehistoric Beasts really blew me away. The CGI is very well done and very convincing. I love how they weave a story around a particular species in each segment.

I highly recommend this film to anyone who loves prehistoric animals and those who are interested in evolutionary theory. Even though an educational film, this will go down as one of my all time favorite movies.