The Good Dinosaur

 

Disney-Pixar’s latest offering, The Good Dinosaur, is exactly that – it’s good. It’s certainly not bad, but it’s also not great. On the scale of Pixar films that has Toy Story 3, Ratatouie, and The Incredibles at the top and Cars 2 and Monsters University at the bottom, The Good Dinosaur is squarely in the middle. There are elements of it that are sublime but other aspects that are pretty ho-hum.
 
 

 The concept of the film itself is unusual. We’re used to talking animal cartoons. Those have been around since the very beginning of movies. But there are usually two kinds - those animals interacting with humans in the world we know. Think of the talking mice helping Cinderella sew her dress or Bugs Bunny foiling Elmer Fudd once again. Then there’s the animals-as-humans approach like the iguana and snake gunslingers in the old west cartoon Rango or Hamlet played with African beasts in The Lion King.    

What makes The Good Dinosaur a little unusual is that while it features animals and humans interacting, their roles are reversed. The giant lizards are the evolved, civilized ones and the humans are the inarticulate ones just barely learning to walk. Instead of the expected dynamic of dinosaurs fearing people or being subservient to them, the movie’s main human character is a dog-like pet to the character from the title.

Basically, The Good Dinosaur is a western. It’s about a family of homesteaders trying to carve out a life for themselves in the shadow of some mountains that looks suspiciously like the Grand Tetons in Wyoming. They’ve built themselves a cabin (a big one) and spend their days tilling the land and raising corn so they can have enough food to survive the winter. The film opens with the birth (or hatching to be more specific) of the homesteaders’ three children – the free spirited Libby, the brutish and thickheaded Buck, and the shrimpy, scared Arlo. 

 Arlo grows up to be skittish and, frankly, a little unlikeable. His timidity is funny at times but grating at others. His funny, panicky scream featured so prominently in the movie’s trailer is featured even more prominently in the movie. After the forty seventh identical scream in the first third of the film, it begins to lose its charm.

Anyway, the real story begins when Arlo is separated from his family. He gets washed far downstream in a river and then has to make his way back over miles and miles of the most gorgeously rendered western landscape I’ve ever seen in a film. He is accompanied by the human boy he names Spot, and Spot, who is brave and resourceful, ends up saving Arlo’s life repeatedly. 

Because it’s a frontier story, there’s a mountain hermit, marauding desperados, and macho, tough-guy cowboys. The cowboys, which are buffalo herding T-Rexes, are one of the best parts of the film, and their leader is played by the granite-voiced Sam Elliot. Elliot doesn’t do anything different than he’s done for a role for the last two or three decades – but having him play a grizzled, scarred, incredibly macho Tyrannosaur simply makes sense and whatever line of dialogue he rumbles out just makes you want to say, “Yes sir, whatever you say, sir.” It’s an excellent piece of casting, and the sequence where the dinosaurs are galloping in slow motion across a grassy plain at sunset to a music very reminiscent of The Magnificent Seven theme is beautiful, knowing, and hilarious all at the same time. 

 

While moving at times, the story fails to tap into the same vein of universality that the best Pixar films hit. Again, it’s good but not great. What is great, however, is the depiction of the dinosaurs’ physical environment. If there weren’t purple and green dinosaurs galumphing everywhere, you would think they simply took hi-def cameras and the world’s best cinematographer to Wyoming and Montana and just filmed everything. There is a level of uncannily beautiful photorealism in The Good Dinosaur that is better than anything you’ve seen in a computer-generated film so far. It is one great aspect of an otherwise good film.