Eric Leighton knows how to make an animated creature look as though it belongs in a real landscape. His co-directed Dinosaur is less persuasive when those creatures speak: we rate the animation more highly than the storytelling.
Fi1m perspective
The creatures in Dinosaur (2000) look solid enough to belong in the landscapes around them. Eric Leighton and co-director Ralph Zondag make their movement convincing, and the film rewards time spent looking at how those bodies have been animated. Then the thin characters have to sustain a routine family adventure. We were disappointed by how little we cared about creatures whose physical presence had been so carefully established. This is accomplished animation in a film we cannot recommend as a whole.
Leighton's grounding was in stop-motion, including work as animation supervisor on Henry Selick's The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993). For Dinosaur, he recruited animators from that production to work with computer-generated creatures. He was bringing stop-motion experience to a different set of tools. The animals' musculature and their placement against live-action backgrounds give us something substantial to look at. The achievement is shared with a team, and we should be wary of assigning it all to either director.
His subsequent career has remained chiefly in animation direction and supervision, rather than feature directing. He was animation director on Peter Jackson's King Kong (2005) and lead animator on Selick's Coraline (2009), returning to stop-motion for the latter. Guest animation on Anomalisa (2015) sits alongside animation direction on Ron's Gone Wrong (2021). Those are different kinds of contribution, and they give us little reason to treat every film as an expression of Leighton's taste.
For us, Dinosaur is an awkward introduction to that work because its most persuasive qualities are easy to take for granted. Once the animals seem solid, we expect them to become interesting company, and the script has too little to offer. As co-director, Leighton still bears some responsibility for that disappointment. Give it a look if creature animation is the attraction; for a family adventure, we would look elsewhere.
Biography
Eric Leighton is an American animator and director. Born on 6 November 1962 in San Diego, California, he began his career in stop-motion animation, working for studios including Colossal Pictures, Industrial Light & Magic, Tippett Studio and Henry Selick Productions.
Leighton served as animation supervisor on The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993). He co-directed the Disney animated feature Dinosaur (2000) with Ralph Zondag. His later credits include animation director on King Kong (2005) and Ron's Gone Wrong (2021), and lead animator on Coraline (2009).
