The Good Dinosaur is Pixar’s most Disney film yet
But Pixar’s newest never reaches the heights of its predecessors. Here’s how that’s possible.
Minutes into Pixar’s newest film, The Good Dinosaur, two apatosaurus parents (voiced by Frances McDormand and Amherst grad Jeffrey Wright) watch over three dinosaur eggs. The first two dinos hatch immediately, eager to explore the world. The third and biggest egg quietly quivers. Then, after a beat, it hatches, revealing a tiny dinosaur named Arlo pressed against the egg wall, terrified to break out of his shell.
A constant undercurrent of fear is the driving force behind The Good Dinosaur, a perfectly pleasant family affair that nevertheless feels a bit emotionally simple, at least by Pixar’s standards.
The film takes place in an imaginary world in which the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs missed its mark, giving the giant lizards millions of years to evolve and exist on the same earth as the earliest human ancestors. Arlo (Raymond Ochoa) is still a knobbly-kneed runt struggling to prove to his industrious family that he belongs. He’s too weak to help his parents plow their cornfield or build a grain silo and too scared to feed the chickens. (Why these agriculturally advanced herbivores need to keep chickens is unexplained.)
After Arlo and his poppa attempt to chase off a human child who has been eating their corn, the two are separated by a raging flood, thus beginning Arlo’s quest to overcome his fear and make his family proud, with a new human companion in tow.
Sound familiar? It should. Though Disney purchased Pixar outright in 2006 (their previous films were done as a partnership), The Good Dinosaur is the most traditionally Disney film the studio has released, sampling story elements from Mulan, The Lion King, and Tangled, among others.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. For every Pixar film whose concept seems ripped from the brains of a five-year-old kid (“Let’s make a movie with talking dinosaurs before we make a fourth one with talking toys or a third one with talking cars.’’), there’s a film about the five parts of the human psyche (Inside Out), a rat obsessed with gourmet cooking (Ratatouille) or a dystopian sci-fi film with a dialogue-free opening 40 minutes (WALL-E) aimed way over children’s heads.
But The Good Dinosaur’s plot structure and dialogue are traditional almost to a fault. Adults who bring their children will appreciate the film’s gorgeous vistas; Arlo’s journey to overcome his fear leads him from the edge of a riverbank to the peak of a snowcapped mountain, with stops at rolling plains and a pristine desert along the way. Seeing the film in 3-D adds a sumptuous layer of depth, inviting viewers to settle in to the prehistoric world where man has yet to evolve beyond caveman-like creatures who speak and act like dogs. (Appropriately, Arlo dubs his human child companion “Spot.’’)
Arlo and Spot’s adventure is short on lighthearted moments. Scenes of the duo getting loopy off low-hanging fermented fruit and encountering an eccentric triceratops who collects woodland creatures to protect him are mere interludes between violent hurricane-level weather that changes faster than New England in winter, roaring waterfalls that threaten our river-bound protagonists at every turn, and a gang of pterodactyls (headed by Harvard-trained actor Steve Zahn) obsessed with snapping up Spot. Though there was very little crying in the preview screening I attended, there were many parents whispering assurances to their children as Arlo lay at the base of a waterfall, bruised and unconscious.
For parents looking for a family activity during the Thanksgiving break, The Good Dinosaur is the perfect film. Like Arlo, the film’s strengths ultimately triumph over its weaknesses. But audiences seeking the transcendent film experience Pixar so often provides should pop Finding Nemo in the DVD player instead.
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