These days it almost feels obligatory that one watch any new Pixar movie that comes out. And thus it can feel genuinely surprising when you realize that you may have missed a movie or to along the way despite your best efforts.
Enter The Good Dinosaur, a Pixar movie that I never properly watched from start to finish. I remember that we had tried to watch a downloaded copy some time back but we were clearly distracted and did not give the movie the attention it deserved in order to fully appreciate the story. I can't really remember why things were that way, but that's just how it played out.
While I do regret having not seen this particular Pixar movie sooner, I'll admit it's not exactly right up there with the best of them, if you get my drift. It's still pretty good and better than your average release but it also didn't quite shine as brightly as some of their other movies have. It's a little hard to explain but I'll try to capture my feelings about this movie in words.
Synopsis: The Good Dinosaur is a 2015 American computer-animated movie directed by Peter Sohn. This movie represented Sohn's directorial debut in terms of a feature-length movie after his short Partly Cloudy that had been included with the original release of Up.
The movie is set on an alternate Earth where the dinosaurs were never wiped out and were allowed to continue developing. And thus we are introduced to a family of farming apatosauruses Henry (Jeffrey Wright) and Ida (France McDormand) just as they have their kids Libby (Maleah Padilla), Buck (Marcus Scribner/Ryan Teeple), and Arlo (Raymond Ochoa/Jack McGraw).
An unexpected rite of passage became earning the privilege of "making their mark" on the silo that Henry had built, typically be performing a significant task for the farm. One by one everyone managed to do so except for little Arlo, who's relatively smaller size and general fear of almost everything significantly held him back. And Arlo's key task ends up requiring him to guard the silo from threats - and this shows up in the form of an odd little caveboy (Jack Bright).
What I Liked: The movie certainly has its charming moments once we have Arlo stuck with the caveboy and the two needing to rely on one another to get back home. As odd as it is to treat the kid like a dog, that's just how the movie works out. And that's where a lot of the heart of this movie really comes to fore.
There is also some amazing animation at work here, especially when it comes to the wide establishing shots or those beauty moments when they just celebrate how pretty the scenery is. The movie makes sure to remind you just how far Pixar has come over the years as they continually push the envelope in terms of what is possible for the medium.
What Could Have Been Better: I know it's somehow distinctly American, but I am confused why this is the second Pixar franchise that has relied on depicting characters as being Southern, in an American sense. We saw it most prominently with Cars and it happened again in this movie. Sure we have a bunch of farmers and dinosaur-equivalent "cowboys" all sounding distinctly Southern with the goonish velociraptors and pterodactyls being almost of the redneck variety.
And it seems to be a bit of a running gag how almost every Pixar movie needs to involve significant loss or pain for the protagonist but this movie didn't quite handle it as well as others had, in my opinion. Maybe it's because of older dinosaur family movies like A Land Before Time that have truly set the standard for how to make such a genre movie sad, this one felt short or even a little off. And thus it made things feel a little cheap or underdeveloped to have sufficient emotional impact.
TL;DR: The Good Dinosaur is a decent Pixar movie but not one of their best for a variety of reasons. It had good moments and a few clever touch points but on the whole it didn't quite strike how it meant to. And thus the movie gets a fair 3 longhorns running to join the herd out of a possible 5.
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