"The Good Dinosaur" was Good?
Looking back at one of the rare Pixar successes of the last ten years
2015 was a weird year for Pixar.
In many ways, it was the last year Pixar felt like Pixar. In the early 2000s, the studio was bought by Disney, and then beginning in 2012, the quality of Pixar films began to drastically decrease beginning with Brave.
Looking at the timeline, Pixar seemed to have ideas in the pipeline with no Disney involvement. The year 2015 was really the last year Pixar released movies that were wholly them. Moreover, it released two of them.
One of them was widely praised and a commercial success to boot. That was Inside Out, which remains one of its best features. The reception of that film overshadowed the other of that year, The Good Dinosaur. I always knew that Inside Out would acquire new depths of meaning for me upon becoming the father of a little girl, but I never expected it of the tale of Arlo and Spot’s adventures.
Re-Evaluating The Good Dinosaur
Of course, the film is absolutely gorgeous. This is Pixar, did you really expect otherwise?
But there is so much more to enjoy. I love the opening conceit in this film: what if the asteroid missed earth, and dinosaurs began to evolve ahead of humans?
So we see after millions of years that dinosaurs develop speech, culture, and the ability to farm. Is it ridiculous? Sure, but consider that for years what distinguished Pixar from other animated features was its world-building in keeping with its characters worlds.
Compare Dreamworks’ Shark Tale and Pixar’s Finding Nemo. The former had fish in cities like ours, but the latter worked within the ecosystem of fish and made it come alive as if it was like ours. This is what The Good Dinosaur does.
This farming concept allows the film to take on Western overtones, taking place in an around California, with a fiddle-heavy soundtrack and Sam Elliot as a voice actor to boot. The family at the center of the tale is a farm family. Our main character is Arlo, who is struggling to make his mark on the world.
From there, the film plays out like a coming-of-age story, where Arlo learns to be a man, to live for something besides himself, and to conquer his fears. It also functions as a boy-and-his-dog story, a la Old Yeller or AXL1.
Character Design
The most divisive aspect of The Good Dinosaur is one of its greatest strengths. The design of Arlo and his family is a weird creative decision. They make them almost look cartoonish with a bright green color and round features, and so unlike any dinosaurs in cinema history.2
But this makes them more human, and thus we are able to better empathize with Arlo and his ilk.
Also, as Arlo’s adventures progress, we feel each of his bumps and bruises along the way. Director Peter Sohn is intentional with this, focusing the camera on Arlo’s knee hitting a rock, or his head scraping the dirt. We see scratches and blood on Arlo, watch as he deals with the pain.
This helps us feel his pain, but with that also allows us to see his strength as he overcomes the injuries.
His human-esque appearance also allows us to make the necessary switch when he encounters the savage human character, Spot. The human in this case is the pet Arlo learns to take care of, and we need the dinosaur to feel the Master for this story to work.
Creative Risks
The creature design is one of the many swing-for-the-fences decisions in this movie.
I’ve already spoken of the risky overarching concept of the movie. But there is also the scene where Arlo and Spot trip on some rotten fruit. There is a triceratops that functions as some sort of insane shaman who tries to recruit Spot to his entourage. What kid gets the Manson reference there?
Then there are the villains, weird pterodactyls that follow the storm and scavenge on the week. They act and sound like meth-heads. And the velociraptors are weird, feathery, snake-like birds. The T-Rex are cowboys who herd buffalo.
Peter Sohn clearly had confidence in these decisions, and the studio believed in him. It may not have paid off in the way he intended, but they are original and outlandish. They are creative risks, and I for one applaud them.
After all, look at Pixar since then. Half of the releases have been sequels. Moreover, one of the original films borrowed creatively from a less popular movie.3 Seeing this artistic courage in hindsight is refreshing.
The End of the Matter
By the time the credits rolled on this rewatch, with my daughter snuggled on my side, I felt like I had watched a new movie. My experience of The Good Dinosaur this time around was so vastly different than my initial viewing. The film felt refreshing, original, moving, and gorgeous. Everything about it is so well-done.
Some movies age like wine, others like cheese. Many fail to achieve success until years later, either because it was the wrong time or perhaps it was overshadowed by others. Both seem to apply with The Good Dinosaur.
It is a weird movie.4 But the lessons are universal. A child learns to mature. A boy becomes his own man instead of a rote clone of his father. He goes on an adventure, takes care of someone else, learns sacrifice, courage, and compassion.
You could do a heck of a lot worse than re-watching The Good Dinosaur with your family. And frankly, I am not sure how much better you could do either.
Thanks for reading.
A movie about a boy and his robot dog, which, I kid you not, made me cry.
On my latest rewatch of my favorite Pixar, Wall-E, I noticed that the cartoonish character design is embedded in the plot. The human characters have de-evolved into jellyfish humans, and one shot showing the captains of the ship displays this process. The first captain was human, and each subsequent captain becomes more of a cartoon until the latest few who are full cartoon. I bet The Good Dinosaur borrowed from this.
Coco clearly borrowed from The Book of Life, a 2014 animated film also about Dia de los Muertos.
I mean, there is a scene where the characters trip out on bad fruit.