The Good Dinosaur: Knock It Off, Pixar!

Everybody seems to have some sort of emotional reaction to Up.  If nothing else, the first ten minutes or so have been known to drive some of the more macho among us into fits of convulsive and reflective tears.  I had such a reaction, not gonna lie.

Then there was the downright beautiful message of Inside Out.  And the ending to Toy Story 3 (for some, anyway).  Jessie’s backstory flashback from Toy Story 2.  The death of Marlin’s wife in Finding Nemo.  FroZone trying to find his supersuit in The Incredibles.  Pixar just has a track record of fucking with our seemingly-adult minds and reducing us to all-too-feeling children.

They continue their success in this field with The Good Dinosaur.

Honestly, having never really seen a full trailer, my expectations from the marketing (posters, mainly) were quite low:  I thought the art style, particularly with regard to our Mesozoic protagonist, was way too cartoony and didn’t seem up to Pixar’s otherwise lofty standards.  When the film kicks on, the usual Pixar humor is there, as an asteroid is shot loose from the Belt, heads straight for our little blue marble, and misses, leaving dinosaurs to continue their dominance over the planet.

We are then introduced to Arlo and his family, a small pod of apatosaurs (or so I’m told) that farm for their sustenance, a trick most herbivores could stand to benefit from.  His elder siblings are recognized for their efforts to help out around the farm, but Arlo just can’t seem to get the hang of things, mostly due to an acute sense of anxiety and fear for basically everything around him.  His father urges him to overcome his fears, to push right through them, in order to grow as a pers– er, dinosaur.  In the process of leading him thusly, his father dies.  Shortly thereafter, Arlo is swept off in the river toward uncertainty in the wilderness beyond his farm.  There, he encounters a wild dog-like human who helps him wend his way through the wilds, survive various threats, and return to his home.

It’s a basic story, especially surprising given Pixar’s propensity for more nuanced offerings.  And it’s also basic character design, all expectedly over-cartoonish and too smooth for its own reptile-y good.

Funny thing, that last point.  For though the characters are doodly, the backgrounds and environments are goddamn gorgeous.  I remember praising the hell out of Pixar’s animators for the ridiculous realism and artistry in the metalwork and whatnot in Ratatouille, but they’ve outdone themselves here.  Some of the hardest materials to render pictorially are stones and water (and metal, but they already more than conquered that faction), and these are present in abundance here.  And they’re spectacular.  The rushing river, the wind-blown stalks of grass and grains, the snow-bespecked mountains, they’re all stunning to behold, nearly photographic in quality.

Hell, the last time I saw animation so relatively good was in another animated dinosaur picture, namely Disney’s Dinosaur.  Clearly, though, Pixar learned from the misfortunes of that failure of a film.  Sure, high-quality animation is important, but if you let that overshadow things, you’re gonna be left with a mediocre product.  So, a balance of sorts was maintained here:  They sacrificed their characters’ visual realism in favor of a more interesting, more impactful story.

Not gonna lie, I fought off tears at a few points during this picture.  Mostly it had to do with Arlo dealing with his father’s death and his own inadequacy.  Hit close to home, despite my father’s continued breathing on this plane of existence.  Hit right in the back of the throat, rings on and everything.

Much like Were the World Mine, this is not a movie that deals in words, but in deeds and the emotional impacts thereof.  It’s a movie that moves you feel things, whether you want to or not.  It moves better than a Bernini sculpture or a Shostakovich symphony at times, and that is some heady praise, m’friend.

I’m not saying this is a great movie, really, but it is one that surpassed pretty much all of my expectations and delivered a heartfelt story with the proper gusto.

Oh, and it had the sense to cast Sam Elliott as a world-hardened T-Rex.  Hellz yeah!