Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara, by James Gurney. He even speculates that dinosaurs communicated among themselves and also with humans by vocalized language along with an alphabet formed by their footprints.The Excursion (1995) illustration for It's a far cry from Jurassic Park, although Gurney does provide dramatic tension by including the voracious tyrannosaurus among his otherwise peace-loving vegetarian dinosaurs, sequestered in its own territory on a remote part of the island. Birthdays - those of both humans and dinosaurs - are observed by parading dressed-up dinosaurs through the streets.
Can we doubt a world so meticulously thought out? Thus primed, we are ready to buy into Gurney's vision, and what a vision it is: Humans ride on willing dinosaurs as if they were horses or camels or fly through the air mounted on enormous "skybax" inspired by the winged Quetzalcoatlus found in the fossil record. The transition from reality to fantasy is made all but seamlessly, as Gurney provides a map to the island of Dinotopia as well as Arthur Denison's actual journal, rendered in mixed media. There's a cast of an allosaurus claw, one of a skeleton of a coelophysis, and one of a skull of an anatotitan. The Norton gets into the spirit of the exercise from the start with a trio of cast dinosaur artifacts, on loan from the Broward College Graves Museum Collection. The 60 or so illustrations and related materials that make up the Dinotopia exhibit are part of the documentation that "proves" the existence of this lost world. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy spins out the culture and history of Middle Earth. The ever-resourceful Gurney then re-creates his imaginary world in astonishing detail, much the same way J.R.R. In other words, he builds what he needs to tell the tale into the tale itself. Gurney wonders, "Had I stumbled upon the only surviving record of a lost civilization?"īy setting his fantasy in the mid-19th century, Gurney smartly takes advantage of not only the relative paucity of accurate, in-depth scientific knowledge about the world at that time but also the sense of curiosity about the world that characterized such inquiring minds as Arthur and Will Denison. It details when "biologist and explorer Arthur Denison and his young son Will set out from Boston, Massachusetts, on a voyage of adventure and discovery." They wash up on the shores of Dinotopia and record their findings in the notebook Gurney pretends to have found. He was "tracking down some information about the spice trade in China" when he found an old leather-bound sketchbook from 1860. Gurney goes even further and fabricates a story about how he discovered the existence of Dinotopia.
#Dinotopia movie illustrators series#
In his series of illustrated Dinotopia bestsellers - A Land Apart From Time (1992), The World Beneath (1995), First Flight (1999), and Journey to Chandara (2007) - Gurney posits a lost island where shipwrecked humans and dinosaurs lived harmoniously side by side.
People and dinosaurs die bitter lessons are learned a healthy respect for nature is reaffirmed.Īuthor and artist James Gurney takes quite a different approach to bringing humans and dinosaurs together.
If you're among the few who have neither read Jurassic Park nor seen the film adaptation of it, here's a quick recap: Man builds theme park populated by dinosaurs made possible by the marvels of cloning. I've seen the Steven Spielberg screen version of Michael Crichton's best-selling 1990 novel several times, but here was a chance to compare that dark fable with a dramatically different take on what might happen if dinosaurs and humans were to coexist. It seemed especially fitting that on the same day I visited "Dinotopia: The Fantastical Art of James Gurney" at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, I also stumbled upon the 1993 movie Jurassic Park while channel-surfing.