The Good Dinosaur

Director: Peter Sohn
Screenplay: Meg LeFauve (original concept and development by Bob Peterson; story by Peter Sohn & Erik Benson & Meg LeFauve & Kelsey Mann & Bob Peterson)
Stars: Raymond Ochoa (Arlo), Jeffrey Wright (Poppa), Steve Zahn (Thunderclap), A.J. Buckley (Nash), Anna Paquin (Ramsey), Frances McDormand (Momma), Sam Elliott (Butch), Maleah Nipay Padilla (Young Libby), Ryan Teeple (Young Buck), Peter Sohn (Pet Collector), Mandy Freund (Downpour), David Boat (Bubbha), John Ratzenberger (Earl)
MPAA Rating: PG
Year of Release: 2015
Country: U.S.
The Good Dinosaur
The Good DinosaurReleased just five months after the massive summer hit Inside Out, The Good Dinosaur, the 16th of Pixar’s feature films, is also the first to be released in the same year as another Pixar film. It is not terribly surprising, then, that The Good Dinosaur plays like a lesser variant on the familiar Pixar formula and performed at the box office accordingly, generating only $121 million domestically, which makes it the least financially successful Pixar film released to date. The best Pixar films—WALL•E (2008), Up (2009), the Toy Story series (1995–2010)—hit you while you’re watching them and also keep you thinking and talking about them long after they’re over; The Good Dinosaur, on the other hand, despite being an exceedingly odd film in many ways, evaporates quickly. It certainly has its charms and is several notches better than a lot of the computer-animated mayhem passed off as children’s entertainment these days, but its impact is almost entirely in the moment.

The film opens with its best visual gag, set 65 million years ago, as we watch a giant meteor hurtling toward Earth, followed by a serene nighttime shot of silhouetted leaf-munching dinosaurs who are completely unaware that a planet-wide annihilation event is about to take place. Except it doesn’t. The meteor shoots right past Earth; cut back to the dinosaurs who look up, watch it fly through the sky like a shooting star, and then return to munching. Thus, the film takes place in an alternate reality in which dinosaurs did not go extinct, but rather continued to live and evolve for millions of years, right into the period when humans first appeared. And this is where things start getting odd, as it becomes clear fairly early on that The Good Dinosaur is a kind of riff on old westerns, with various dinosaur species standing in for the archetypal western characters: farmers, ranchers, rustlers, etc.

We are introduced to an anthropomorphic family of Apatosaurus, who have developed an agrarian culture of growing and harvesting corn (they plow the ground with their huge heads and carry things in their mouths). Poppa (Jeffrey Wright) and Momma (Frances McDormand) are eagerly waiting for their three eggs to hatch, which produce Buck (Ryan Teeple), a vivacious bully, Libby (Maleah Nipay Padilla), a pleasant goofball, and Arlo (Raymond Ochoa), the quivering runt of the group (who also happens to come out of the largest egg). Unlike his bigger, more gregarious siblings, Arlo is inherently fearful of everything, including the strange chicken-like creatures he is responsible for feeding on the family farm. As he grows up, his place in the family becomes exceedingly awkward, and he strives to “make his mark.” Unfortunately, he is accidentally washed away in a massive river, thus setting up an extended journey back home (quite similar to the ones in both 1994’s The Lion King and 2003’s Finding Nemo) that will provide him ample opportunity to prove himself and conquer his fears of pretty much everything. Along the way he must deal with hostile environments (mostly cliffs and raging rivers), psychotic pterodactyls led by Thunderclap (Steve Zahn), feathered Velociraptors, and a group of cow-herding Tyrannosaurus Rexes headed by the gravel-voiced Butch (Sam Elliott).

Arlo also develops a relationship with a young Neanderthal boy named Spot (Jack Bright) who is partly responsible for a terrible tragedy early in the film. Spot is essentially nonverbal, and he behaves like a dog—panting, sniffing, howling, walking on all fours, and biting at everything in sight. The antagonism between him and Arlo slowly dissipates as they travel together, each helping the other out at various points (Arlo first softens to Spot when he realizes that the boy dug his foot out from between two boulders where it had become trapped, thus sparing him the need to cut it off ala 127 Hours (2010), although that exact situation is later recounted by one of the T-Rexes who chewed off the end of her own tail). The moments between boy and dinosaur tend to be the best in the film, partially because they can’t communicate verbally, so they must do so through eye contact and body language, which gives the film an often powerful sense of physical presence and detail. The film’s most emotionally effecting scene comes when Spot and Arlo are trying to tell each other about their respective families using sticks, and Spot conveys that he is orphan by taking the two sticks representing his parents and burying them in the dirt.

Like all Pixar films, The Good Dinosaur is visually impressive, with grand vistas and landscapes that feel like they were pulled right out of a John Ford or Howard Hawks western. It has a varied sense of humor that works more than it doesn’t, even if the oddness of the film’s central conceit might have you scratching your head from time to time. There is a definite unevenness to the film—narratively, emotionally, and tonally—which may have to do with its troubled production, which lasted more than six years, saw numerous delays on the release date (it was originally intended to come out in 2013), and lost original writer/director Bob Peterson (co-director of Up), who was replaced by first-time director Peter Sohn (a veteran Pixar animator and story artist). The final screenplay is credited to Meg LeFauve, who also cowrote Inside Out, but it feels like a mixed bag (there are five people credited with the story, including Peterson).

Sohn has clearly absorbed the Pixar formula, and outside of the prehistoric version of an LSD trip when Spot and Arlo ingest a hallucinogenic plant, he doesn’t add stray much, relying instead on the tried-and-true elements of orphaned children, odd-couple buddy comedy and sentiment, and big action to see the story through. It should be noted that The Good Dinosaur is a darker and more violent film than you typically see out of Pixar, partly because it is dealing with dinosaurs, after all, many of whom eat other dinosaurs. There is a definite streak of black humor throughout the film, some of which verges on being simply mean (let’s just say the PG rating is well deserved). The pterodactyls, for example, are at first presented as helpful as they save a cute, fuzzy creature from a pile of storm debris only to then eat it. And then there’s the scene where Spot presents Arlo with a massive, squirming bug that the herbivorous dinosaur finds disgusting, although the real gross-out moment comes when Spot rips the bug’s head off with his teeth, exposing its gushy pale innards. Older kids will probably find such moments hilarious (as I did), but the younger and/or more sensitive in the audience might not find it so funny.

The Good Dinosaur Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

Aspect Ratio2.35:1
Audio
  • English DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1 surround
  • French Dolby Digital 5.1 surround
  • Spanish Dolby Digital 5.1 surround
  • SubtitlesEnglish, Spanish, French
    Supplements
  • Audio commentary by director Peter Sohn, story supervisor Kelsey Mann, supervising animator Mike Venturini, director of photography/lighting Sharon Calahan, and supervising technical director Sanjay Baksh
  • Sanjay’s Super Team theatrical short film
  • “True Lies About Dinosaurs” featurette
  • “Recyclosaurus” featurette
  • “The Filmmakers’ Journey” featurette
  • “Every Part of the Dinosaur” featurette
  • “Following the T-Rex Trail” featurette
  • “Dino Bites” promotional montage
  • “Hide and Seek” animated promotional clip
  • Three deleted scenes
  • Three trailers
  • DistributorWalt Disney Studios Home Entertainment
    SRP$39.99
    Release DateFebruary 23, 2016

    VIDEO & AUDIO
    The Good Dinosaur’s high-definition presentation on Disney Blu-ray is fantastic. For whatever the film lacks in terms of narrative and character, it is an absolutely gorgeous movie to look at, especially its highly detailed environments, which look wonderful here. The raging river, which is so photorealistic you’d swear they were splicing in actual footage, the snow-covered mountains, the open plains of golden grass, the storm-choked skies—all look great. Colors are strong, detail is top-notch, and contrast is right on. Not a complaint to be had. The DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1-channel soundtrack is also extremely impressive, with great dynamic range, immersive surround effects, and a thundering low end that give the storms and rapids a real sense of weight. And, while The Good Dinosaur is also available in Blu-ray 3D, I did not receive a 3D disc to review, so I can’t comment on how effective the stereoscopy is.

    SUPPLEMENTS
    There are quite a few supplements included on the Blu-ray, although they are not nearly as comprehensive or deep as those we’ve seen on previous Pixar Blu-rays. Those who are interested in the technical aspects of the film’s production should head straight to the engaging audio commentary by director Peter Sohn, story supervisor Kelsey Mann, supervising animator Mike Venturini, director of photography/lighting Sharon Calahan, and supervising technical director Sanjay Bakshi. You will learn a lot about the film’s process and the artistic choices that were made—although don’t expect to hear anything about the troubled nature of the film’s long gestation, as that is completely left out. There are five behind-the-scenes featurettes, but all together they run less than 40 minutes, so there isn’t a lot of meat there. The heftiest of the bunch is “The Filmmakers’ Journey” (8 min.), which includes interviews with members of the production team as well as footage of a research trip they took to Jackson, Wyoming (which clearly influenced the look of the film and its environments). “Every Part of the Dinosaur” (6 min.) focuses on the unique challenges inherent in animating anthropomorphic dinosaurs and a human child that is more akin to a dog, and “Following the T-Rex Trail” (7 min.) shows the filmmakers visiting a working cattle ranch to get ideas. “True Lies About Dinosaurs” (2 min.) is an amusing throwaway bit about the license that was taken with dinosaurs (yes, we know they didn’t speak English, or farm for that matter). And, in the “Why Working at Pixar Is So Much Better Than Your Job” category, we have “Recyclosaurus” (6 min.), which documents the studio’s competition among different departments to build a dinosaur made out of a roll of duct tape and whatever they found on the studio’s “free table,” where employees leave stuff they don’t want, but is too good to throw away. Speaking of stuff that got thrown away, there are three deleted scenes, all of which were cut at the rough animatic stage, introduced by Sohn (they run about 10 minutes total). Also on the disc is Sanjay’s Super Team, the action-packed animated short film that played theatrically before The Good Dinosaur; “Dino Bites,” a four-minute montage of original animated promotion pieces; “Hide and Seek,” a short animated clip that was used to promote the film; and three theatrical trailers.

    Copyright ©2016 James Kendrick

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    All images copyright © Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment

    Overall Rating: (2.5)




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