The Good Dinosaur
was originally slated for release last year, but for unknown reasons, the
original director was scrapped and the project was delayed by a year and a half
in order to be reworked into its current product. This isn’t the first time that Pixar has run
into a troubling production cycle, but, at least in my opinion, the other Pixar
movie to come out of that development hell (Brave)
was as worthy of the Pixar name as any other.
However, I’m not so sure that this is the case this time around. Don’t get me wrong, this is still a pretty
good movie, as Pixar’s standards are (usually) well above what is considered
passable for children’s entertainment; yet it still comes across as lesser than
its siblings.
Part of this has to do with the simplicity of the film’s
set-up. Set in a world where dinosaurs
were never eradicated and have evolved into sentient species, the film focuses
on the journey of Arlo, a cowardly young Apatosaurus who is swept away from his
family by a raging river and must find his way home. Accompanying him on this journey is a feral
human whom he names Spot, a non-verbal sidekick who is less rabid than he
initially appears and whom Arlo grows to love in their quest to return home.
Though Pixar has made simple, clichéd set-ups like this work
before (see the aforementioned Brave
in telling a Disney Princess story), they have gotten by on strong character
development that is sorely lacking in The
Good Dinosaur. Arlo is entirely
defined by his coward-to-courage character arc, and Spot functions entirely for Arlo to bounce his thoughts off of when he isn't acting as cheap slapstick comic relief. Other dinosaurs appear throughout the film as
interesting characters that offer funny and heartfelt moments, but their
presences are purely transient, only serving to act as pit-stops for Arlo to
receive on-the-nose advice.
The animation itself, though, is gorgeous. Or, at least, the wooded setting of the film
is. The mountains and rivers have an
almost photo-realistic quality that is unparalleled in animated cinema, which
makes it all the more disconcerting to watch the extremely cartoony character
designs of the dinosaurs romp across its landscape. The choice seems like a conscious one, as if
the animators knew that the simplistic story they were working with would have to be
carried by expressive faces and eccentric movements, but it feels jarring in
juxtaposition to such carefully crafted realism. This isn’t to say that the expressive animation
isn’t effective, as the film still manages to offer heartfelt moments of
genuine emotion through little to no dialogue, but the two well-meaning
elements of exaggerated emotion and photorealism just don’t visually work well together.
This review sounds quite negative, but it really isn’t meant
to drive people away from seeing The Good
Dinosaur. This is still Pixar, and
in light of the recent revelation that the studio plans to continue sequelizing
with little original content on the horizon, this film is a welcome entry to
their catalog for that reason alone.
However, especially in the inevitable comparison to recent masterpiece Inside Out, it’s hard not to see how
Pixar squandered some missed opportunities with this one. The
Good Dinosaur is definitely worth seeing, but lower your expectations for
it to be merely good, rather than the usual Pixar greatness.
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