The Good Dinosaur
Directed by Peter Sohn (2015) **1/2
Remember when Bambi‘s mother died, making children cry, and the Witch in Snow White peddled poison apples, making children scared? Pixar’s latest, The Good Dinosaur, outdoes those Disney movies with a near non-stop series of sequences designed to make 5-year-old kids beg to leave the theatre (which has been happening, as reported in comments sections for the film). Want to see a half boy, half dog rip the head off of a live, huge beetle and proceed to eat it? See The Good Dinosaur.
That the film also has much sentimentality, sure to cause even the hard-hearted to sniffle, reveals its dual goals. It’s minor Pixar, odd, not completely thought out, with as many faults as virtues.
The premise is that the dinosaurs didn’t die out, but evolved so that, a million years later, dinosaurs are the more advanced civilization, while humans are sentient, but only partially walking upright and not yet speaking a language. This premise isn’t described by voice-over, though, or in any other way, so be prepared to do some explainin’ to kids who’ll have many questions after the movie.
Did I mention The Good Dinosaur is a western? The dinosaurs are agrarians who grow corn, herd buffalo, and speak in accents from Bonanza and Big Valley. Sam Elliott even plays a Tyrannosaur, telling of the scars on his face, “The last croc, I drowned him in my own blood.”
For all of its mashed-up, complicated world, The Good Dinosaur‘s story is simple: Our protagonist, Arlo, must grow up, conquer his fears, and fill his father’s footsteps. This he does in a long, lost journey back to his family’s home, a journey fraught with danger and menace and … yawn. Along the way he bonds with a human boy he calls Spot (one of the best designed characters in the film).
The Good Dinosaur has enough emotion and action to hold the attention of adults and children, but it has problems. That’s not surprising: the original director was removed and replaced halfway through the project, and five names are listed in the writing credits. Unlike the best Pixar films, The Good Dinosaur doesn’t feel like the result of one, strong vision.
The dinosaur character designs are also an issue. The lush, photo-realistic and quite beautiful scenery shows amazing advancement in the digital arts (many of the shots were so detailed I assumed they were location footage, but that’s not so). 
The dinosaurs, though, are goofy, simple designs that look not much different than Gumby and Pokey. The incongruity of the complex backgrounds and cartoony characters is unsettling.
Lastly, there’s the dichotomy between the simplicity of the story, appropriate for a young child, and its execution, filled with violence, harsh environments and deaths. To make it worse, the film’s filled with what I call “startle shots”, loud, intrusive, surprising shots of danger which, as anyone who’s seen an Alfred Hitchcock movie can tell you, are the opposite of suspenseful. Startle shots are cheap, annoying, patronizing, and bad for kids and adults. I haven’t mentioned the hallucinogenic sequence of Arlo and Spot accidentally ingesting psychedelics. Man, that was weird.
I believe Pixar needs to slow down, take a breather and stop churning out films like clockwork. Their best films (Up, Ratatouille, Wall-E, the Toy Story films, etc.) were created with care.
—Michael R. Neno, 2015 December 8