The Good Dinosaur

Movie Information

The Story: A young dinosaur proves himself on a series of adventures. The Lowdown: If you're old enough to read this, you're probably too old for the very thin story being told in Pixar's latest.
Score:

Genre: Animated Dinosaur Kiddie Movie
Director: Peter Sohn
Starring: (Voices) Raymond Ochoa, Jeffrey Wright, Frances McDormand, Steve Zahn, Sam Elliott
Rated: PG

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I am, by no means, one of those people whose heart beats faster when he sees the name Pixar affixed to a movie, so I am less likely than many to cut the latest offering some slack just because of the brand name — and The Good Dinosaur (The Barely Tolerable Dinosaur is more like it) needs all the slack it can get. Now, I’ve deliberately avoided the Cars movies — and that could make a difference — but this is easily the worst Pixar title I’ve seen. In fact, I’ll go out on a limb here and say it’s actually pretty bad. In a way, it’s worse than bad. It’s boring, out of fresh ideas and so lacking in story that it barely exists at all. Yeah, it has the requisite “believe in yourself” moral, but what children’s movie doesn’t? And this is very much “believe in yourself” 101 — maybe even the nursery school edition. Here is a movie geared to only the very youngest of viewers — and perhaps those seriously obsessed with dinosaurs — while not forgetting to include scenes where cute creatures are casually consumed by villainous pterodactyls as luncheon snacks.

 

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The premise of The Good Dinosaur is intriguing — what if the asteroid that took out the dinosaurs had missed hitting the earth?. What is done with that premise is not. I suppose it sounds like the gateway to a Creationist’s theme park dream come true, though I doubt the movie’s notion of a world where humans are reduced to wolf-like wild creatures and agrarian dinosaurs are the advanced species would play well in that realm. In any case, what we end up with is the old — so very old — cowardly-runt-of-the-litter-makes-good yarn, with little Arlo (Raymond Ochoa) proving himself. Of course, this involves killing off Poppa Brontosaurus/Apatosaurus (Jeffrey Wright) in the process, followed by the requisite adventures and Arlo making friends with a human boy (Jack Bright) he names Spot. (The level of invention is not high.) Workable? More or less. Impressive? Not so much. Worse, it’s all uneven and only barely hooked together.

 

THE GOOD DINOSAUR

 

Rather than any kind of smoothly integrated narrative, we end up with a series of choppy vignettes of wildly varying quality — and that’s being charitable. On those rare occasions when the movie flirts with inspiration — like the cowardly Styracosaurus (director Peter Sohn) — the flirtation is little more than a short-lived cameo. Even the scenes with the likable Tyrannosaurus Rexes — headed-up by a grizzled dino-patriarch Sam Elliott doing his Sam Elliott thing — have a perfunctory feeling, giving the movie the inescapable sense of just marking time. And marking it very slowly.

 

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Pixar apologists are out in force raving over the film’s “photo-realist” beauty. Are we really still supposed to be impressed by a movie being able to create realistic settings on a computer? Even if we are (and I’m not), it’s a stretch to view that as a saving grace. It’s all too reminiscent of the old saw about theater production design: “No one ever went out humming the scenery.” More to the point here, what is the idea of creating this realistic world and filling it with creatures that look like refugees from The Flintstones TV series and Mowgli from 1967’s The Jungle Book? Like so much of The Good Dinosaur, it just doesn’t hang together. Will it beat out this week’s other mainstream titles at the box office? Probably, but it’s a pretty soft week. Rated PG for peril, action and thematic elements.

 

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About Ken Hanke
Head film critic for Mountain Xpress from December 2000 until his death in June 2016. Author of books "Ken Russell's Films," "Charlie Chan at the Movies," "A Critical Guide to Horror Film Series," "Tim Burton: An Unauthorized Biography of the Filmmaker."

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6 thoughts on “The Good Dinosaur

  1. T.rex

    I agree about the “computer imagery” thing. I so miss large sets on a film shoot and still dumbfounded that Avatar won best cinematography!! WTF.
    Unfortunately I did drink the Pixar kool aid years ago. (except for the Cars movies, they suck)

    • Ken Hanke

      You misconstrue what I meant about computer imagery. I have nothing against it and it’s hardly eating into large sets on a cartoon (especially one that is itself computer generated). My problem is people wanting me to ooh and ahh over the realism of the computer imagery here.

  2. Tonberry

    My son, who is three years old, and LOVES dinosaurs, walked out of this movie. As I felt my brain shut down through boredom during one of the many vapid sequences, I looked at my son and noticed the same zombified look I was going through. So I took a chance and asked him, “Do you want to leave?” and he muttered “Uh-huh.” Thus the first movie he walked out on.

    He is now at an age where he constantly asks the ‘why?’ to a lot things, and as I placed him in his car seat to leave he looked at me earnestly and asked “Why didn’t I like the movie? Why was the Good Dinosaur not good?”

    I smirked. I suppose this is the age where movie taste starts to develop.

  3. Tonberry

    Not yet. Ideally, I would like to upgrade the sound from TV speakers to a decent audio system before embracing my son to the psychedelic experience of ‘Tommy.’

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