For some lore on this review series
Prior to making the decision to watch all the Pixar movies there were two Pixar movie titles I did NOT want to watch. One based on word of mouth and the other I had actually seen before. I knew I didn’t like it then. The Good Dinosaur is the later, I had seen it once before and I didn’t like it.
But MAYBE, just maybe on a rewatch I will like it more or at least appreciate its artistic or narrative merits more than the first time I watch this movie.
Maybe?
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The Answer is…
No!
It’s really REALLY tempting to just copy and paste “No” for paragraphs on end it was also really tempting to DNF this movie on the whole but I did watch the entire thing (skipping some parts and taking many breaks) so I will not just so No, I didn’t like it.
I do have to hand it to Disney, they know how make dinosaurs boring, and I freaking LOVE dinosaurs.
The Promise of Premise
The premise of The Good Dinosaur is what if the Cretaceous – Paleogene (K-Pg) extinction event never occurred and dinosaurs were left as the dominant animal type on Earth? What would mean? What would that look like? And there has been more then few works of fiction and media to do this concept however what matters is the execution of the concept and in this movie case it’s the Dinosaurs are either in agricultural labor or hippie scavengers.
So our fanatical concept involves main character, Arlo an Apatosaurs, who trying to get back home to his family who live on a corn farm and his “dog” who is a human but acts like a wolf. And the plot is basically The Lion King mixed with An Incredible Journey but with some dinosaurs. I feel like this a waste of the narrative concept.
They are just dinosaurs, with no tech or ingenuity aside from planting corn or all things and building a silo for their corn harvest and other farm structures for their “chicken” who eat the corn too.
Just Shut-Off the Mind
So I mentioned corn but there is also a pumpkins. Both plants are the product of natural selection by humans at around 7000BCE. Then again Arlo is an Apatosaurs, a species which was already existent by the K-Pg extinction event.
I’m not saying that this movie based on the premise had to bend to science or strictly adhere to science but there is to a lack of imagination with this take. It’s just a narrow scope based in Pixar’s other movies.
In many ways it’s a disservice that The Good Dinosaur was the follow-up to Inside Out as that movie had a lot science behind it which informed the imaginative take on the human mind, memory and emotions. The Good Dinosaur could have been rooted in real approach to the hypothetical alternative science to add to sense of whimsy and fantasy of the world. Instead this movie seems stymied by realism based on what’s already exists in the current world. This means by the movies’s logic the Ice Age did happen but dinosaurs themselves never evolved beyond their stereotypes 1950s aesthetic but mammals, reptiles, avians and plants did evolve.
There is also no culture other than some Dinos some work the land and some scavenge. We really don’t know too much the dinosaur’s way of life other than they bury their dead and eat corn. That is most “culture we get” other than Dinosaurs who live outside the agriculture sphere are more nefarious. Because while the human, Spot, can just eat ugly bugs it’s not cool when the Pterodactyl eat cute animals, though I really don’t like those guys or that part, one of the parts I skipped over.
Again I might have been able to shut-off the part of my brain that actually likes evolutionary biology, I read Your Inner Fish for fun, if the rest of the movie was engaging.
Other Parts of the Movie
One of the highlights of this movie are the beautiful realist backgrounds and that is what everyone wants to sit down and watch for 90 minutes, pretty screen-savers. In truth maybe doesn’t sound so bad. Also this was also the stylitic choice give to Disney’s Dinosaur another boring movie that pairs a sauropod dinosaur with primates going on a journey.
So the premise/story while sometimes interesting it was done the best in this movie offering but at least for me I can forgive a weak narrative if the characters are engaging.
And no they are not. Really there are like three characters, Arlo, Spot and Arlo’s dad who is a less interesting Musafa character. Spot is a human who acts like a puppy and also has a dog’s sense of smell which is another fantastical aspect of the this movie in league with corn and Apatosaurs surviving post 86 million years to the K-Pg extinction event. I wish this movie had had a magic system it could have been forgive. Wizard Dinosaurs? Why Not?
Anyway Arlo is the only character to get anything close to an arc. He starts off scared of everything and then he learns that it’s ok to be scared as long as you push through it. Which is not the worse mortality for a movie but a lot of this movie is just Arlo yelling and screaming which doesn’t make for a compelling character.
Also I take umbrage with ending which Arlo reuniting with family and putting his mark on the silo at end as culmination to his journey and being brave. The mark was award successful completion of jobs on the farm. He didn’t deserve it thus it felt hollow much like the rest of the movie.
Animation & Design
Retreading the aspect of the beautiful realist backgrounds and while they are lovely the look of realism juxtaposed against the very soft-rounded character design of the dinosaurs is a little jarring. As if the movie subconsciously knows the dinosaurs don’t belong in this setting/period.
Final Thoughts
In many ways I wish this movie was more. Either more whimsical or more funny or more emotional. It just ekes along making it hard to watch as it’s dull but at least the backgrounds are pretty.
Just read Dinotopia for the premise.
