The first concept was that they (Disney) wanted Aladar, our hero, to speak like a big dinosaur but in a rhythmic fashion that would give him a signature quality of a lemur."After establishing the basic lemur vocalizations, Boyes tried to fit elements into Aladar but found they didn't really work. Instead, he let Aladar be a dinosaur, with the compromise being that he would be more melodic and vocal than his brethren. "The big challenge on Dinosaur was to create a series of languages," Boyes says, "evoking emotions that were everything from joyful and happy, to mournful and sad. With the human language, we can inject emotion very easily, but to try to do that by twisting sounds that originally came from animals was a challenge and perhaps the most difficult part of the film."
The early part of the film takes place on Lemur Island, where life is good and the comet hasn't yet rained destruction. Boyes tried using real lemur calls, but found them too mournful to be twisted into something joyful. "So I used a combination of penguins, a fox named Socks the Fox, and capuchin [monkeys]. The penguins had these wonderful whoops that worked well for movement, a jumpy kind of excited call. The capuchins were tremendously vocal and rattled off all sorts of little chirps. And Socks the Fox made these wonderful mournful yips and yaps that I was able to use both for happy and sad lemur. Then there's a wonderful scene, during mating season and just prior to the comet falling, where they're coming into the camera and have these happy bellows. For some of those key calls, I ended up with human voices-one of my Foley editors."
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