The Good Dinosaur

Butch: If you ain't scared, you ain't alive.

I'm always willing to give Pixar movies the benefit of the doubt but this one was tough even for me. I'm a little surprised Pixar even released it with how many problems it had even on a conceptual level. In the trailer, we're pitched that this is an alternate timeline where dinosaurs were never wiped out and wound up evolving along with people. But in truth, this was really just a clumsy excuse to have a dinosaur be the main character. If you substituted anything else (foxes, dogs, robots), the story would have turned out the same. At its core, it's just a story about a boy who gets lost and has to find his way home. Unfortunately, it wound up as a worse, confused version of Finding Nemo.

The film opens with a dinosaur family on a farm. Arlo is the youngest son, small and scared on everything from small bugs to lighting storms. We spend far to long on the farm to establish just how a big a sissy Arlo really is but we never see anymore of dinosaur society than his family farm. As a result, not only is Arlo an exaggerated charicature, the world also feels sparse, with dinosaurs simply a warped reflection of human evolution. Even when events that should be important happen, they aren't given the weight they need to feel important. When the action finally does start a third of the way through the film, the lost Arlo and Spot, his pet human, are subjected to weird, slightly disturbing events that don't have any relevance to the overall story. It isn't until half way through that the story really picks up and then it suddenly transforms into a western. But by this point, we already know everything that's going to happen in the climax because we've been hit over the head with the foreshadowing so hard, we're in danger of a concussion.

Really I can find very little positive to say about this film. At its best, it's not terrible, but it is never funny, interesting or likable. Everything from the plot to the characters are clumsy and sophomoric. There are gaping holes in the logic behind the dinosaurs' evolution and society. However, if you come to Pixar for the animation, there is some beautiful landscape work throughout the movie. Other than that, it's best suited for children. In my mind, it ties with Cars 2 as the worst Pixar film to date.