| runtime = 30 minutes
| language = English
| country = United Kingdom
| genre = Nature documentary<br>Docudrama
| cinematography = John Howarth<br />Michael Pitts
| editor = Greg Smith<br />Andrew Wilks
| director = Jasper James<br />Nigel Paterson
| composer = Ben Bartlett
| narrated = Kenneth Branagh<br />Stockard Channing (US)<br />Christian Slater (Prehistoric Planet)
| executive_producer = Tim Haines
| producer = Jasper James<br />Nigel Paterson
Walking with Beasts, marketed as Walking with Prehistoric Beasts in North America, is a 2001 six-part nature documentary television miniseries created by Impossible Pictures and produced by the BBC Science Unit, the Discovery Channel, ProSieben and TV Asahi. The sequel to the 1999 miniseries Walking with Dinosaurs, Walking with Beasts explores the life in the Cenozoic era, after the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs, particularly focusing on the rise of the mammals to dominance. The UK version of the series is narrated by Kenneth Branagh, who also narrated Walking with Dinosaurs, and the US version is narrated by Stockard Channing.
Like Walking with Dinosaurs, Walking with Beasts recreated extinct animals through a combination of computer-generated imagery and animatronics, incorporated into live action footage shot at various locations. It was more challenging to create convincing effects, both computer graphics and animatronics, depicting mammals owing both to fur and more moving bits and to audiences being more familiar with how mammals look and move than they were with dinosaurs. The visual effects of Walking with Beasts, like those of Walking with Dinosaurs, received praise. The series won numerous awards, including a BAFTA Interactive Entertainment Award, a Monitor Award, a RTS Television Award and a Primetime Emmy Award.
Premise
Walking with Beasts follows the previous series Walking with Dinosaurs (1999) in showcasing prehistoric life in a nature documentary style. Beginning in Germany 49 million years ago (in the Eocene), Walking with Beasts tracks animal life, particularly the rise of the mammals to dominance, in the Cenozoic era. The series also gives some insight into human evolution, with Next of Kin (episode four) being devoted to Australopithecus and Mammoth Journey (episode six) including both Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans.
Production
Pre-production, research and writing
thumb|The final episode of Walking with Beasts, Mammoth Journey, was filmed in [[Yukon, Canada]]
After the success of Walking with Dinosaurs, the executive producer Tim Haines conceived Walking with Beasts as a sequel. The intended goal of the series was to introduce the general public to the fascinating mammals (and other animals) of the Cenozoic era, typically less represented in popular culture than dinosaurs. The budget of Walking with Beasts was £4.2 million,
Research in preparation for Walking with Beasts was conducted full-time for nearly two years by the geologist Paul Chambers and the zoologist Alex Freeman. Like Walking with Dinosaurs, Walking with Beasts was set to consist of six episodes which meant that six suitable settings had to be chosen for the programme. Chambers and Freeman picked the six settings of the programme based on the amount of good fossil evidence, position in the time line and number of interesting animals. The settings of some episodes had been picked already before any research was required, such as doing an episode on woolly mammoths and an episode on indricotheres. For much of the process, Chambers and Freeman were considering more than six settings, which meant that some potential episode ideas were forced to be abandoned. Among the abandoned ideas were an episode set in Australia, based on fossils from the Riversleigh World Heritage Area.
In order to write the storylines for the series, producers Jasper James and Nigel Paterson watched numerous nature documentaries on modern animals. They wanted to avoid episodes simply becoming "lists of animals and how they lived" and instead wanted them to draw viewers in and make them want to know what would happen to the animals next. The textures of the animals were designed by skin designers, with advice from researchers. For some of the animals in Mammoth Journey (episode six), cave paintings could give an idea of real life colors but for most others the patterns were educated guesswork. Animators worked closely with researchers; experts were brought in to look at the movements of each animal to ensure that they moved accurately and advice was gathered on what behaviours each creature could have exhibited. The prosthetics used by the actors were also made by Crawley Creatures.
Ben Bartlett, who had previously worked on Walking with Dinosaurs, composed the music for Walking with Beasts. The composition process began with Bartlett and the directors (Jasper James and Nigel Paterson) viewing the different episodes together without sound and determining specific scenes that stood out as especially requiring music. Bartlett approached Walking with Beasts differently than he had Walking with Dinosaurs; the score in the previous series often included sophisticated themes and orchestral sweeps to reflect the grandeur of the dinosaurs. When it came to the Cenozoic, Bartlett found the era much harder to characterise, concluding that the "beasts" were less "refined" than the dinosaurs before them. As a result, the score of Walking with Beasts intentionally disobeys standard rules of sophisticated harmony, focusing on simplicity but also at times having "big blocks of sound [crashing] in uninvited".