1 /10

Warning: Spoilers

Pixar have always been a shining light of absolute quality in story telling, characters and animation.



Where DreamWorks and Disney often labor the point of a story, or fumble around in sentimentality, mediocrity - Pixar have always been absolutely genius at bringing something original and truly memorable to the screen.



A company that produces such wonderful movies as Cars, The Incredibles, Nemo, Toy Story and Wall-E - should not, could not - produce this completely worthless piece of nonsense.



My three year old spends his days singing the songs from Cars, recreating the action with his toys, and playing with his Woody and Buzz - he's also a HUGE dinosaur fan - so while something like "Inside Out" is a bit beyond him, how could a dinosaur movie where the dinosaur is good rather than 'scarewee' as he says go wrong!!!!



Seemingly on every single level.



While the scenery is gorgeously rendered with absolute realism the characters themselves are completely devoid of any effort at all. There is nothing about Arlo the dinosaur or the small human boy that is even slightly interesting or novel. They are drawn and animated as though someone said to an animator - you have 10 minutes to render a dinosaur and a small boy. It is saying something when the toy dinosaur in Toy Story is rendered with more love and affection, and more genuine character than any dinosaur in an entire movie which has the word 'Dinosaur' in the title.



Apart from a small 2 minute section of the movie, where they meet a very interesting hippie dinosaur who was brilliant but who they inexplicably just bump into, exchange about 20 words with and then leave - there is no redeeming or interesting character anywhere in the movie.



Arlos father seems to be more interested in Arlo murdering a child, his siblings seem to be evil bullies - Arlo himself is a wimp and the human child is more wolf like than human. Every other character they meet seems to be either racist (some deep South accented dinosaurs portrayed as dumb hicks) or some weird T-Rexes who gallop along rounding up bison with accents straight out of John Wayne movies.



The film moves from one scary scene to the next, so from horrible storm and a badly injured limping Arlo, to Arlos father being drowned in the river, to Arlo in another storm falling down a hill and passing out in the water, to him falling off a cliff, to him running out of food, to being attacked and hunted and so on and so on.



It is completely relentless in its desire to just move to another cliff hanger. The friendship between Arlo and the human boy seems like fluff - with just silly setups like character A gets stuck, wakes to find character B has helped them. Character A gets hungry, finds character B leaving or shoving food there way. Character A and B fall asleep and wake up to find they're leaning against each other. There are no genuine touching moments, "Ice Age" while garbage compared to most of Pixars output, still managed a more convincing buddy story of odd companions traveling together than did this movie.



At the end of the movie Arlo finds his way home and inexplicably pushes the human boy onto a random human family that he moments before rejected for some reason. He makes his way home and is allowed to leave his foot print on a wall which he wasn't allowed to do earlier because his family viewed him as a giant clumsy wimp who wouldn't kill a human.



There was so much opportunity for a movie which had the premise that "What if, the dinosaurs weren't wiped out". But apart from the farm that Arlo and his family come from, there is no indication of any dinosaur civilization other than random ones that try to either attack him or eat him. I was expecting something more Flintstones - but it seams that the only premise for the meteor missing the earth was to allow a dinosaur and a human to co-exist in the story.