Five months, Pixar. Five (5!). It took you just five months to go from arguably your best feature film to, quite easily, your worst. Rest easy, A Bug’s Life fans. Breathe more confidently, supporters of Cars 2, this dinopic might be filled with lizards and humans, but it’s a dog, a mangy, scurvy mutt of a cash-in. Oh, The Good Dinosaur might just amuse your toddler for five minutes, provided of course he has been conditioned to stare at “Teletubbies” and finds “The Flinstones” a celebration of art and sound, but this is not the film your children are going to watch over-and-over-and-over.
I get it, now, Pixar. This is why you only make one (1) film a year.
In the opening, we’re shown that the cataclysmic, dinosaur-killing meteor gives Earth a miss and thus The Good Dinosaur is allowed to portray a world in which dinos and humans exist together. Congratulations, three seconds in and you’ve already used up the most creative thought this film had to offer. Good Dinosaur went to a great deal of trouble to drive that point home, but then didn’t really explain why/how the apatosaurus is agrarian. Yeah, dinosaur farmers. Gonna plow more than an acre of land there, Farmer “Pat?” Well, hey, why would you? I mean it’s not like five apatosauri (mom, dad, three children) weigh several tons. Maybe that long winter you’re saving for only lasts a weekend – you know, climate change and all.
Runt of the litter Arlo (voice of Jack McGraw, then Raymond Ochoa) is failing to earn his keep, so dad (Jeffrey Wright) gives him the task of trapping and killing the creature who steals from the dino-silo. When Arlo takes pity on the human he caught, dad scolds, and the two chase after the thief. Caught exposed when a storm arrives, dad sees his death come in the form of a raging river, storming the valley not unlike the wildebeest stampede that costs Mufasa’s life in The Lion King.
Left alone, Arlo is forced to befriend the very dog-like human for survival and companionship. Hmmm, isolated lizard and human have to reach common ground? Yeah, that doesn’t resemble How to Train Your Dragon at all, does it? And then the two oddly matched companions have to trek their way back to family, which bears no resemblance to Ice Age. None whatsoever.
Look, I don’t mind a retread. Plenty of films borrow from ones before them. Thing is, my Pixar stadards are just a tad higher than that – you’ve
conditioned me to expect originality, Pixar. Also, I’d like a reason to root for either of these guys and pure vulnerability ain’t doin’ it for me. The hound-human is a scavenger and the Arlo is kind of a whiner. It’s like the film randomly picked two characters to follow hoping that their story would be the most compelling. I suppose it was in that none of the others re-lived Ice Age, but, seriously, why these guys? And what is with the weak animation?
For all the theft of Lion King, Dragon Training and Ice Age, the film The Good Dinosaur resembled most was actually the forgettable Walking with Dinsaurs 3D. Unless you grew up in a village of Botswana where the collective held but one DVD, odds are you have seen that film, at most, one time. Similarly, and despite some nice sentimentality towards the end, I suggest you see Pixar’s very worst film ever one (1) time maximum. And if you give it a miss, well, let’s just say some dinosaurs have extinction comin’. KnowwhatI’msayin’?
♪Boo Boo thumbs a downa downa boo
Boo Boo thumbs a downa downa boo
It was screen like this just half a year ago
I ate buttered popcorn, sat to enjoy the show
Inside Out, it rocked, got me teary-eyed just right
Thinking ‘bout it now, faced with Pixar’s recent blight
And mocked Good Dinosaur, I mocked that new eyesore
Open the door, get off that floor
Everybody mock Good Dinosaur
This is a chore, don’t need no more
Everybody mock Good Dinosaur
If you can count up past four
You don’t need Good Dinosaur
Mediocre to the core
That is The Good Dinosaur♫
Rated PG, 100 Minutes
D: Peter Sohn
W: Meg LeFauve
Genre: The rare Pixar flub
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: Your four-year-old who has not seen a film older than 2013
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: Me
♪ Parody inspired by “Walk the Dinosaur”
