Starring: Raymond Ochoa, Jack Bright, Jeffrey Wright, Frances McDormand & Steve Zahn
Directed by: Peter Sohn
Rating: ★★
A few months ago I reviewed the Disney Dip disaster Dinosaur, a film so wholly unoriginal and uninteresting that it fell forgotten into the chasms of time. I speculated that perhaps Disney were making another dinosaur film to try to make more money from merchandise, and to whitewash the mistakes of their past.
Unfortunately for them, The Good Dinosaur is another prehistoric blunder in the Disney film series.
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| Can the good dinosaur make it home? |
Slow, dull and miserable, The Good Dinosaur is a mix of the worst of past Disney films: The Lion King’s paternal angst, Brother Bear’s gloomy morbidity, Home on the Range’s Tex-Mex flavour and Homeward Bound’s entire plot.
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| And there aren't many dinosaur either... |
The film isn’t dreadful- we’re not on Meet the Robinsons levels here, people- it just isn’t very good, especially for the audience it is primarily aimed at, which is children.
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| Sorry Spot, but I can't see many people enjoying this movie. |
The initial premise, that an asteroid that would have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs misses Earth is completed wasted, as dinosaurs supposed ‘evolution’ (which is implied but not stated) means that they become talking corn farmers. Not at all inspiring.
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| Yee-haw! Let's all build a... silo? |
The titular good dinosaur is Arlo (Ochoa), an Apatosaurus. Arlo gets separated from his family’s ranch and has to make his way back home, overcoming various obstacles along the way- including his fear of the unknown.
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| There are also some zany feathered Velociraptors- who don't do much... |
He also learns to love a human child called Spot (Bright), and the two have a sort of adventure together, which basically comprises of them falling off of things and fighting strange looking animals. But don’t be fooled by my description- the words ‘adventure’ and ‘fight’ imply that exciting things happen- which they definitely do not.
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| Let's run through a bunch of birds for 20 minutes! |
I had a lot of problems with The Good Dinosaur, mainly seeing it from the perspective of a young child: there aren’t enough dinosaurs, there isn’t enough action, the plot is wafer thin and nothing particularly interesting happens.
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| Let's farm for 20 minutes! |
The main thematics of fear and family are really rammed into the audience’s face, and the sometimes stark and unpleasant ‘realism’ of emotions and physical violence would probably not appeal to young children. It certainly didn’t appeal to me.
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| Let's talk to another 'zany' dinosaur- for 20 seconds... |
I liked the fear elements of the film, but they didn’t fit with the rest of the movie. It seemed like multiple storylines had been pushed together and jumbled up into a weird hybrid movie that ultimately didn’t work. Maybe this has something to do with the fact that the film’s original director ‘left the project’ halfway through due to ‘story problems’.
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| I'll tell you a tale or development hell... |
The film isn’t without merit- there are some powerfully emotive moments, and the relationship between Arlo and his father and Arlo and Spot are the strongest scenes. The part where the characters run through the fireflies is beautiful and moving, and the final scene between Arlo and Spot is genuinely touching.
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| The firefly scenes are the film's best. |
But the movie’s main strength is its graphics, which are astounding. The photorealistic backdrops are awe inspiring and stunningly striking. But as we know with other films, by themselves, spectacular images do not make a good film, specifically one as dry and dreary as The Good Dinosaur.
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| It looks great, but where's the plot? And I'm not talking about the farm... |
This is the second film from Disney Pixar this year, and unfortunately it could not top or even compete with Inside Out, a film that has genuine emotion, beautiful images and a compelling story.
Clearly Disney just don’t know how to do dinosaurs right. Perhaps in another fifteen years’ time they might try again. Let's hope not...
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