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22 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A risk that really succeeded, June 13, 2002
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.
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DVD ~ Kenneth Branagh
DVD ~ Robert Winston
DVD ~ Kenneth Branagh
DVD ~ Kenneth Branagh
DVD ~ Kenneth Branagh
