The Good Dinosaur marks Pixar’s sixteenth feature length film, and their twelfth non-sequel outing. The film’s premise has the comet that is theorized to have killed off the dinosaurs missing Earth, allowing the dinosaurs to survive millions of more years until the arrival of man. We follow Arlo, the youngest member of an Apatosaurus family, who is trying to prove he is capable of doing his share of the work on the family farm. Through a series of circumstances, Arlo is swept away by the nearby river, along with a “critter” (a barely evolved human child), and we then follow their journey together back home.
Production on The Good Dinosaur was famously pushed back due to issues with the story, and it clearly shows. Pixar’s strongest attribute has been storytelling, and the studio has a history of incredibly original films, with Monster’s Inc., Ratatoulle, and Up, among the most imaginative. But The Good Dinosaur suffers from a rather bland and relatively unoriginal script. It borrows heavily from Finding Nemo and Ice Age, and most of the beats of the film are highly predictable.
Pixar also has excelled at writing for a very broad demographic, with stories and dialogue that appeal to both children and adults alike. But the demographic for The Good Dinosaur is very unclear. The story is incredibly simple, so much so that adults may be bored by it, while a few scenes are a bit too intense for younger viewers. Pixar has also been very successful in weaving humor and sentiment throughout their scripts, but there are very few laughs to be had here, which places the film more in the drama category than anything else. There are moments of real emotion here, but they pale in comparison to films like Toy Story 3 and Up, whose first act contains one of the most effectively heartfelt and emotional scenes in animation, if not film, history. And laughs are sparsely peppered in, a far cry from films like Finding Nemo and Dreamwork’s Penguins of Madagascar.
While the story may be sub-par, the design and rendering of the backgrounds are not. The Good Dinosaur boasts the best CGI landscapes we’ve seen to date. Avatar previously held this honor, but The Good Dinosaur, dealing in realistic backdrops rather than fantasy, creates incredibly photorealistic and visually stunning backgrounds that are equally inviting as Pandora, if not more so. Like Avatar, this is the sole reason to see the film in 3D, but it’s by no means necessary, as it still looks phenomenal in 2D.
While the backgrounds truly standout in this film, the same can’t be said for the character design. Arlo and his family of Apatosauruses suffer from rather bland and generic dinosaur designs, as do most of the other characters in the film. They come off as extremely cartoony, which, compared to the Ice Age films, whose character designs are fun but still fairly accurate, is a bit disappointing. Pixar chose to make their first feature film about toys because they knew at the time that they were still years away from the kind of texture rendering that could recreate anything other than plastic and rubber. In the twenty years since Toy Story came out, computer animation, and Pixar specifically, has advanced leaps and bounds in that department, and yet most of the characters in The Good Dinosaur look as though they’re made of rubber, with very little color variation, which is punctuated by the gorgeous realistic backgrounds.
While Pixar has done an exceptional job of voice casting in the past (as opposed to other animation studios who simply stunt cast), there are very few stand outs here. The only exceptions are Sam Elliott as a long horned cattle wrangler T-Rex, who is not given nearly enough screen time, and Jeffrey Wright, who does a fine job as Arlo’s well meaning and stoic father. John Ratzenberger pleasantly pops up as a member of Steve Zahn’s pterodactyl gang, continuing his streak of appearing in every Pixar film thus far.
Over all, The Good Dinosaur isn’t a bad film, and had it been made by a different studio, it may not have been subjected to such scrutiny. But Pixar has set a pretty high bar for their films, and The Good Dinosaur falls far short of it.