Review of The Good Dinosaur (2015) by Arya Darma D — 08 Nov 2016

"The Good Dinosaur" is not a bad film, per se, but it's a far cry from the top tier work we've come to love and expect from Pixar. This is not due to falling short technically - indeed, the backgrounds alone deserve an Oscar - but instead the film fails on the grounds of story.

This is an enormous disappointment since "story" is an area where Pixar traditionally thrives. Here instead we find a well-worn and unimaginative tale that we've heard many times before.

But the nail in the coffin of this film for me is this: it doesn't matter that the lead character is a dinosaur!

Unlike Cars where the film starts to fall apart if the characters were humans, Wall-E where the characters had to be robots, or Toy Story which wouldn't have worked any other way, The Good Dinosaur tells a story that doesn't even NEED the titular dinos. Worse still, the story actually makes more sense if the characters are replaced with humans. Now instead we have a story of a frontier boy who befriends a wolf. We've seen this before...several times.

Which brings me at last to this: why were humans depicted like some kind of wolf-people? As a type of cave man species, we'd expect ape-like behavior. Not dog-like.

In the end, the story was predictable because we've seen it before. The characters were not memorable. And there were strange changes in tempo and style throughout that led to a disjoint, wandering mess of a story.

From any other studio, this would be passable. Pixar, on the other hand, has earned the right to be held to a higher standard. As a Pixar film, this doesn't deserve even one star.

[Family friendly notes: little kids might find this one to be too scary at times. There is a very strange interlude where characters are apparently drunk on fermented fruits. It's kind of funny and bizarre at the same time. A creature has its head taken off and another is devoured whole. I'd say no younger than 6 for this, but you're the parent.].