Disney Pixar’s latest animated movie promises to be nothing short of heartwarming and full of surprises. That includes the notion that the giant meteorite which hit Earth 65 million years ago, leading to the mass extinction of large dinosaurs, actually missed instead.
Advertisement
Through harsh conditions and an unfamiliar landscape, Arlo meets some interesting friends and learns how to control his fears and discover what he can do if he puts his mind into it. I’ll grant you a dinosaur with a human buddy, but I’m confused by a group of T-Rex ranchers yelling “giddyup” when herding buffalo because, um, they aren’t riding anything? There’s nothing wrong with it and a great deal right with it, but it’s a lot less ambitious than the last film from Pixar, the consciousness-exploring wild ride “Inside Out”.
That’s easy for brash, bruising brother Buck (Marcus Scribner) and headstrong sister Libby (Maleah Padilla, ) but Arlo is a smallish (for his kind) and timid sort who gets rattled just by feeding the family “chickens”.
As directed by Peter Sohn, who’s worked on several Pixar projects as an artist and a voice actor, “The Good Dinosaur” threatens to go into schmaltz overdrive for what amounts to two back-to-back endings. “Don’t worry though, Pixar’s general manager and president said, in an interview with, “…we changed the story to make it better, and we’re very proud of the film we have now”.
Poppa is patient, and tells Arlo that he will one day prove himself if he just keeps trying, is courageous, all that. But his father, Poppa, is always there for him, encouraging Arlo to step out of his comfort zone, to confront his fears, to make his mark. He is charged by his father with protecting the family corn silo from a “critter”, which turns out to be a small cave boy who will come to be known as Spot (Jack Bright).
“The Good Dinosaur” is in theatres now. But “The Good Dinosaur” takes a different path, and plays like a prehistoric mix tape, mashing up familiar and not-so-familiar characters in a way that feels more curious than clever. The seemingly disparate art styles of the characters and their environment end up dovetailing in graceful, unexpected ways: Arlo and Spot have all the charm and emotion that comes from stylized animation, but they’re also grounded by the detailed, organic world around them. And the thin story and initially sparsely populated world means that the moralising at first feels exposed and belaboured. The production for the movie began in 2009 with Bob Peterson and Peter Sohn as co-directors and a targeted Thanksgiving 2013 release.
Advertisement
This works to good effect – although if you have an already rambunctious kid, you might want to be prepared for him to growl and howl like Spot.
