Jurassic World Dominion Director Colin Trevorrow Reveals Which Dinosaurs Are Animatronics

Jurassic World Dominion is now playing in theatres, and it’s being received better by audiences than the critics. The sixth Jurassic movie is currently up on Rotten Tomatoes with a 33% critics score and an 80% audience score. ComicBook.com gave the movie a 3.5 out of 5 and called it “overly long but full of heart.” According to director Colin Trevorrow, Dominion has more animatronics than the previous two movies combined. During a recent chat with The Hollywood Reporter, the director revealed some of the dinosaurs that were animatronics. 

“Yes,” Trevorrow replied when asked if the animatronics are mainly built for the actors to interact with. “We build them for when they don’t have to do something like run or fight. That’s basically it. So they can be of all different sizes. We built the Giganotosaurus, which was stalking our characters slowly. That was a kind of sequence I really wanted to get back to that I’d done in the first film and that Jurassic Park had done well. And there are several sequences like that where you’re just listening to characters breathe and there’s an animatronic coming for them. We build them especially for a scene like the one with Laura [Dern] and the baby Nasutoceratops, which we also saw in Bryce Dallas Howard’s first scene. Animatronics give them the ability to interact with it as if it’s another actor because there’s another performer behind it. It really is a human and a human communicating via a puppet, which is a beautiful kind of art.

Jurassic World Dominion stars Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard star as Owen Grady and Claire Dearing as well as Jurassic Park alums Laura Dern (Ellie Sattler), Sam Neill (Alan Grant), and Jeff Goldblum (Ian Malcolm). The film also features BD Wong as Dr. Henry Wu, Isabella Sermon as Maisie Lockwood, DeWanda Wise as Kayla Watts, Mamoudou Athie as Ramsay Cole, Dichen Lachman as Soyona Santos, and Campbell Scott as Lewis Dodgson.

ComicBook.com recently had the chance to chat with Sermon, and we asked about the new movie’s animatronic dinosaurs.

“Oh, completely, completely,” Sermon replied when asked if the more realistic dinosaurs change the set’s atmosphere. “I think that a lot of the fear that the cast feels in the film is real. It’s genuine. Though the animatronics, they’re terrifying, I mean, numerous times I’ve forgotten that there were people inside, and they’d cut the cameras and then the animatronics would start moving, I’d literally have a heart attack. But yeah, it was really, really helpful, especially to have them on set, and to have something to look at, and to have something organic to react with.” 

Jurassic World Dominion is now playing in theatres.