Action Dinosaur follows a time traveling action hero T-Rex from the prehistoric 80s and his best friend, a silent-but-deadly ninja. When a crisis strikes, our heroes team up and make everything much worse in this throwback to the classic Saturday morning cartoons of childhood.

Director’s Statement

I wrote Action Dinosaur about 4 years as an exercise when I was in a creative rut. I was trying to write something “meaningful,” but that was a lot of pressure and I kept getting stuck. To loosen up the writing muscles, I tried instead to write something silly, something I would have loved as a kid. I had so much fun with it, when I finished the script I wasn’t really ready to let it go. But if I was going to put the time into making it, I wanted to do it right. At my producer’s request, I made a list of stars I wanted for the project – stand up comedian Kyle Kinane was right at the very top. I’ve been a huge fan of his for years, and his voice was the only one I could picture coming out of Action Dinosaur’s mouth. I We sent him the script and some reference art (we didn’t have a character designer on board yet), and thankfully he wanted to do it.

Once we had the voiceover, we started interviewing artists we found online on various websites. The one we went with, Ha Huy Hoang, we found thanks to his concept art on DeviantArt – again, we reached out and were lucky that he wanted to do it. Once we had our team, we built out an animatic and tried to court an animation studio – and when we couldn’t find one in our budget, we decided to build our own team and went to Kickstarter. After raising the funds we pulled together an international team of artists working remotely to create the cartoon – with work done in at least five different countries at all hours of the day. Animation took about 9 months, as most of our crew was working full time on top of working on the video.

What I loved about making Action Dinosaur, beyond working with some of the most incredibly talented people, is that the only goal of the movie is to have fun. It’s just a love letter to a decade of bubblegum pop colors and sugary cereal, trying to twist your expectations and make you laugh. Sometimes that’s enough.