







★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆





Pterodactyl sacrifice! Men and dinosaurs living together! Mass hysteria!





Well, sort of. Pixar’s The Good Dinosaur (after many, many years in the works) has finally arrived. We follow young, fear-stricken Apatosaurus Arlo in his journey home after a terrible event separates him from his family. Oh, and the asteroid that should have killed the dinosaurs missed, so we’re joined for the ride by tiny counterpart Spot, a scuffed and tousle-haired human toddler.





On a purely aesthetic level, this film serves one purpose: if you are one of those people who sees no use in CGI, who thinks film-making would be better if we went back to the seventies and refuses to let digital worlds draw you in; this film exists to prove you wrong. It is visually flawless. We're talking animation so advanced that if you removed the bouncy characters from the equation, there are moments where it could feasibly be shot amongst real-life mountain ranges, across sweeping plains, on the shores of pebbly-beached rivers.





Our companions through this extraordinary world are a mixed bag: Raymond Ochoa and Jack Bright are undeniably sweet as double act Arlo and Spot, but Frances McDormand and Jeffrey Wright feel a little thrown away in bit-part roles and Steve Zahn as Thunderclap appears to be doing an impression of Sam Rockwell all the way through. One genius piece of casting is Sam Elliot as a grizzled T-Rex cattle driver, who makes the very best of an out-of-place yet sumptuous Western chapter. Yes, a handful of the characters are fun to be around, but I just don’t think they’ll have the staying power that is the hallmark of Pixar’s roster.





Having to play second fiddle to Inside Out can’t be an easy thing, and having such a troubled production history doesn’t help. This unlucky combination of such an insightful predecessor and a jumbled mix of plotlines and ideas is just unfortunate happenstance: the film can’t help that it has nothing new to say. There are interesting ideas in it (the original premise is essentially rather brilliant), but they’re thoroughly underdeveloped, under-played in the comedy department and swept over by the gobsmacking vistas.





The story, too, has clearly suffered as a result of the change of director and re-writes: when the predictability sets in and we find ourselves traipsing through movements that even the child audience will have seen before, director Peter Sohn and co. tend to fall back on sugary weepiness. Yes, there is plenty of catharsis in the emotions, but again, it’s a lot of what we’ve seen done better by films like The Land Before Time, an animation which introduces extraordinarily important and adult themes (that we’ve rarely seen since) into a kids’ dinosaur adventure with charm and heartbreak to spare.





No, of course The Good Dinosaur isn’t a bad film. There is not a soul on this Earth who could possibly deny the beauty of the animation or the genuine emotional heft, even if these mainly serve as stand-ins for a more substantial story and fresher characters. The kids will be enthralled, but those of us who have come to expect greater things from Pixar won’t be fooled: running along the front rows of the cinema chopping onions is cheating, and they know it.