The Good Dinosaur [PG]

Little Arlo was born the runt of the litter: always coming last after his brother and sister and always frightened of everything. But when his father dies, everything changes. One day, during his chores on the farm, Arlo falls into the river and is carried far away from home and his family. Wounded and scared, he endeavours to follow the river home with a tiny wild boychild as company. Together they battle fearsome pterodactyls, trek over barren wildernesses, and even travel in the company of tyrannosauruses on the road home. 

The newest adventure to come out of Pixar Studios, The Good Dinosaur is a sweet little film with a good, recognisable but timeless story, fresh and clever writing, and mesmerising voice acting. Whilst it’s not the excitement and hullabaloo of other Pixar classics such as Inside Out or Wall-E, it’s still a fun and sweet family movie that holds something for everything, traversing the path more of A Bug’s Life or Cars in terms of furore. 

The first thing worth of mention is the freshness and cleverness of the screenplay. Rather than depict a movie where dinosaurs are real dinosaurs roaming the earth, eating, fighting, whatever, writers Bob Peterson, Peter Sohn, Erik Benson, Meg LeFauve, and Kelsey Mann mix things up and make the dinosaurs more relatable to by giving them human lifestyles. Arlo and his family are corn farmers: they till the earth, plant the seeds, water them, pick the harvest, and then store it in a stone silo. There’s a family of tyrannosauruses that own and herd cattle, and the pterodactyls are religious fanatics. By making these creatures recognisable characters, the writers have created a gorgeous little world of their own and it does take a little bit of the scariness out of the ‘monsters’ themselves, making them more likeable and accessible to younger audiences. 

Needless to say, the voice acting goes right along with the characters and their stereotypes: the tyrannosauruses are all rednecks complete with scars, missing digits and gritty southern accents, and the pterodactyls have that melodramatic edge to their voices that is really sinister and unnerving. 

Needless to say that the fanatics are the villains. 

The graphics are another reason to be captivated by this movie. Pixar’s graphics are just going from strength to strength with the textures of rippling water, leaves, dirt, and general landscapes being absolutely breathtaking. 

However, all that glitters is not gold. With such detail and realism going into the graphics of the surrounding world, the characters themselves still seem very cartoonish and kind of out of place. This is definitely the case with the design of Arlo who is deliberately made to look different from his family by disproportionate limbs and elongated or caricatured parts of his body. Whilst he still is a cute and loveable hero he does stand out against such beautiful surrounding graphics and it throws the aesthetics off a bit. 

Featuring the voice talents of Jeffrey Wright, Frances McDormand, Marcus Scribner, Raymond Ochoa, Jack Bright, Steve Zahn, Mandy Freund, Steve Clay Hunter, A. J. Buckley, Anna Paquin, Sam Elliott, Carrie Paff, Calum Grant, and John Ratzenberger, The Good Dinosaur is a sweet little coming-of-age story and a lovely tale of overcoming one’s fear. It doesn’t follow in the lines of the bigger Pixar movies: it’s the smaller one that Pixar make to fill in time between blockbuster releases, but there is nothing wrong with that; it still makes for a cute little film. 

Filled with action, adventure, drama, friendship, and comedy, whilst I wasn’t overjoyed with it I still enjoyed it.