Not all dinosaurs are terrifying like the ones in Jurassic Park and not all dinosaurs have tragic backstories like Little Foot in The Land Before time, but all dinosaurs should at least be interesting. And that’s the most disappointing part about Pixar’s The Good Dinosaur, is that the characterizations of the dinosaurs are as vanilla as their designs. Any dreams about this dinosaur movie being “good” are crushed like a meteorite crashing into a planet, and fails to live up to Pixar’s standards on (pre)historic proportions.
The Good Dinosaur (2015) seemed destined for storytelling extinction even before its release. The developmental process was a disaster—Peter Sohn replaced Bob Peterson as director late in the production, Meg LeFauve’s (who also wrote Inside Out) screenplay had to be reworked, character design for the dinosaurs underwent several changes, the voice casting was almost entirely switched, and the release date had to be pushed back by two years. As a result, The Good Dinosaur is sorely underdeveloped and never given the chance to piece together a coherent story.
The film opens with the “meteorite that wasn’t.” A meteorite zips over Planet Earth and the dinosaurs survive to witness the Age of Man. Except the beginning of the Age isn’t humanity’s proudest moment, as our ancestors walk on their knuckles and have the mannerisms of puppies. We’re introduced to a family of Apatosaurus chicken and corn farmers—apparently, eating tree leaves just doesn’t cut it anymore—Poppa (Jeffrey Wright), Momma (Frances McDormand), Buck, Libby, and Arlo (Raymond Ochoa). Arlo is the runt of the litter and has a deep-rooted fear of, well, everything. Poppa tries his best to instill some grit into Arlo, but it seems that the youngest Apatosaurus is destined to become a victim of natural selection. But after a couple of plot contrivances involving water and terrible life choices, Arlo is separated from home. A puppy dog human that Arlo calls “Spot” (yeah, we get the connection Pixar) bonds with Arlo, and together, they’re forced to survive whatever horrors nature can throw at them.
Pixar’s genius has always been its unusual, imaginative concepts. A rat puppeteering a human with hair, the monsters on the other side of the closet, an elderly man who travels in a flying balloon-powered house—and with The Good Dinosaur, dinosaurs and humans coexisting in an alternative universe. But what great Pixar films have that this one does not, is a sense that the main characters have a definitive goal and make their own path to reach it. Remy wants to be a chef, Sully and Mike want to get Boo home, and Carl wants to bring Ellie to Paradise Falls. For these characters, they each take active roles in the events that transpire.
I obviously wasn’t there behind the scenes at Pixar, but if I were to guess why the production hit a brick wall, it would be that the creators realized they placed themselves in a trap. The initiating conflict is an immediate flaw, because it places Arlo in an impossible situation. He has a clear goal in mind—find his way back home—but neither he nor Spot has any means to return. It forces the movie to constantly come up with different characters for Arlo to encounter that can give him guidance, which places the story in a never-ending deus ex machina. Mechanisms aside, the characters Arlo and Spot meet aren’t even clever or interesting. About halfway through The Good Dinosaur, it suddenly veers off into a parody of the Western format. There’s a family of Tyrannosaurus rustlers who speak in the thickest southern country accents I’ve ever heard, hillbilly velociraptors (one unfortunately voiced by John Ratzenberger), and a cult of fanatic pterodactyls.
The Good Dinosaur isn’t a level of mediocrity like Antz (1998) or The Wild (2006), but it feels very childish by Pixar standards. Which is a shame, because the amazing photorealistic scenery is like looking at Renaissance landscapes come to life. The scene that I’m sure we’ve all seen in trailers and movie posters where Arlo and Spot are standing in a field of dragonflies is every bit impressive as you could imagine.
Sadly, the artistic beauty is undermined by the lack of any substance to complement it. The scattershot narrative and boring characterization makes it difficult to see any bond developing between Arlo and Spot. And despite The Good Dinosaur being billed as a story between dinosaurs and humans, very little of that actually happens. Unless you’re a giant fan of Pixar, then you can do the same thing with The Good Dinosaur that the meteorite did to Earth—pass it over.
Rating: D+ | 1.5 stars
