I have no issue with presenting us with a wary young character unsure of his lot in life – Simba was a fine protagonist – but Arlo is nearly too pitiful. “The Good Dinosaur” is pitched to an audience a few years younger than “Inside Out” and has a few moments that are a little intense for the youngest moviegoers. One exception was past year, when DreamWorks Animation claimed the holiday with Penguins of Madagascar, which opened to a disappointing $35.4 million for the five days.
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Sanjay’s Super-Team is a really good little film, inspired by director Sanjay Patel’s childhood conflict with his father, and based on his Hindu-inspired artwork. The youngest of three dino triplets is Arlo (voiced by Raymond Ochoa).
Familiar voices such as Sam Elliot, Jeffrey Wright and Frances McDormand anchor the film’s often dialogue-free adventure, while the musical score and character’s actions do the talking.
Is Pixar doing the right thing quality-wise by pushing two films out in the same year? Now most of the commentary around The Good Dinosaur will likely be “it wasn’t as good as Inside Out”, and it’s not. Arlo finds himself in dire peril on several occasions, facing predatory carnivores including a wicked-looking cobra-lizard creature, and dangling off the side of sheer cliff faces. Don’t believe a word of the not so flattering reviews as they’re written by older jaded critics that have seen everything. It plays out a classic boy-and-his-dog tale, only the dinosaur is the boy and the human is the dog.
If you followed the progress of Peter Sohns The Good Dinosaur with any real interest, you may know that the story went through major overhauls during its production.
Martin has been speaking to Peter to find out more about The Good Dinosaur and what it was like making the movie. You get the sense they came up with The Good Dinosaur’s basic conceit just to dodge scientific criticisms from Neil Degrasse Tyson. He befriends a wild animal, the two help each other, and they make their way home, the youth learning that he is stronger and more mature for his ordeal.
None of this would matter if the film reaching theaters worked, if the behind-the-scenes maneuverings led to the creation of a fantastic feature. As far as my dazzled eyes could tell, Pixar somehow found a way to transport Roger Deakins and an Imax camera back to a prehistoric, ahistoric earth, and gave him an unlimited budget for lenses.
There is enough of a charm and sweetness to carry The Good Dinosaur and the friendship between Arlo and Spot is nicely defined and portrayed. But overall The Good Dinosaur is meant for kids and kids at heart.
As Arlo and Spot travel on their voyage of self-discovery, the fun of the journey is the wide variety of out-and-out outlandish characters they run into.
Of course, when the time comes Arlo can’t do it and Poppa and him end up chasing Spot to the mountain where Poppa meets his untimely demise.
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In a video for Gizmodo, Tyson says that the world depicted in The Good Dinosaur would be possible if the meteor missed and didn’t take the world’s largest predators out of the equation – but only if all those dinosaurs would be limited to one land mass so that other mammals could evolve into humans. Your kids won’t mind, but I bet you’ll notice.
