The Good Dinosaur (2015)

The Good Dinosaur

Written by Meg LeFauve

Directed by Peter Sohn

Accompanying Short: Sanjay’s Super Team

Written & Directed by Sanjay Patel

It’s taken 16 films, but I’ve finally reached a film I hadn’t already seen before! Most of the films to follow I haven’t seen (save for two), so this is the part of the list that I’m really excited about. Often, when I get to a portion of a list that I haven’t seen, it’s because I’ve decided to feature the list here on the blog, and while that’s true for the last few entries on this list, the same can’t be said to be true of The Good Dinosaur. I haven’t seen it before simply because I wasn’t as anxious to see it as some of the others on the list, because The Good Dinosaur is Pixar’s first true flop.

Sanjay and his Super Team

Before the film is the short Sanjay’s Super Team, a humorous look inside a young boy’s imagination. I connected with this short more than I expected, because, like Sanjay, when in boring situations, I tend to look around and imagine wildly fanciful scenarios: some humorous, but more often, dramatic. Here, Sanjay is pulled from his morning cartoons to pray with his father, and imagines himself battling with Gods to overpower a dangerous adversary (I will fully admit that, when forced to attend church for a short period of time (partly because of family wishes, partly in an attempt to “pray the gay away”), I would only half-listen to the sermon and instead would imagine dramatic scenarios in which I was the hero). The animation is really interesting, and uses a variety of techniques…it’s more than I expected from the short, and I rather liked it.

When I say The Good Dinosaur was a flop, I don’t mean that it’s bad. I mean, it’s not GREAT, but it isn’t bad either. I’m not entirely sure why this film flopped. It could be that this was the first time that Pixar released two films in the same year (with Inside Out being released only five months before), so perhaps audiences were Pixar’d out (I don’t REALLY think that’s the case, as Pixar has done it at least once more since 2015, and is planning on doing so again later this year). I think The Good Dinosaur really was a victim of poor word-of-mouth and a bad release date, opening against five other films (one of which would win the Academy Award for Best Picture the following year), and in the second week of the run of the final Hunger Games film.

The climatic battle

It’s a bit of a shame, because there are some really great aspects to this film. Primarily, the artistry of the locations, which look amazingly photorealistic. Back in 2000, Disney released Dinosaur, a really-not-great film that featured actual live backgrounds behind the animation. Here, everything is animated, but the backgrounds look just as amazingly realistic as the real ones did fifteen years prior. Looking at a certain element, like water, it’s amazing to see the progress of the realism, from Finding Nemo, to The Incredibles, and now to The Good Dinosaur…it’s breathtaking just how realistic these images appear.

Cartoony characters against photorealistic backgrounds

The downside to how amazing the background looks is that it makes the characters seem much more cartoony in relation. Everything about the characters seems exaggerated and rubbery, even with how they move. Indeed, there’s no weight or gravitas to these dinosaurs: these things weigh a ton (at least), and yet are constantly thrown around or fall down huge rocky ravines and just bounce right back up like nothing happened. Even in battles, there’s no physical damage done to any of them; Arlo, the main apatosaurus of the film, gets into a fight with a gang of pterodactyls, who mercilessly scratch and bite him, and his only lasting damage is…some red spots on his skin. I think it’s an artistic choice to not show any wounds, since this is a kid’s film, but kids have seen worse, even in Pixar’s other films.

Methasaurs

There is also a strange decision to have a couple different veiled allusions to drug use: the first is when Arlo and Spot eat some rotten fruit from the ground, and the other is the decision to have the velociraptors act like tweaked-out meth-heads (to the point that I dubbed them “methasaurs” in my notes). Drug and alcohol use in kids films has always seemed a bit weird to me (when I re-watched Dumbo a few years back I was shocked when I put the pieces together), so why it’s here, I’m not entirely sure.

I think another reason the film did poorly is that this film feels, more than any other Pixar film before it, to be catering directly to children. Pixar generally appeals to the full, wide-range of the audience of all ages. Here, it just feels like a kids film. Animation isn’t just for kids (despite views of the contrary): adults don’t have to “grow out” of cartoons if they simply look past the medium and engage with the story, but The Good Dinosaur seems to ignore the adults in the audience, leaving the door open for boredom and indifference. The Good Dinosaur has a lot of good going for it, but it doesn’t reach great.

SHORT GRADE: B+

FILM GRADE: B-