Movie Review: 'The Good Dinosaur'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Earlier this year, many viewers found the animated comedy, Inside Out, however brilliant, elusively esoteric.
That should not be the case with Pixar's second animated release of 2015, The Good Dinosaur, which is perhaps more exclusively aimed at youngsters than any previous Pixar 'toon.
The Good Dinosaur is an amiable prehistoric comedic adventure with an intriguing premise:
Suppose the asteroid that presumably crashed on Earth 65-million years ago passed us by and did not rid the planet of its largest reptiles.
Then suppose the dinosaurs evolved to the point where they were working routinely as farmers and cattle herders.
Then further suppose that an 11-year-old Apatosaurus named Arlo (voiced by Raymond Ochoa), and his pet boy, Spot (Jack Bright) – a wordless youngster with what might be called canine tendencies – undertook a journey that comprised a fresh spin on the boy-and-his-dog coming-of-age flick.
The clumsy Arlo, the youngest of three, being the fearful sort, his parents (Jeffrey Wright and Frances McDormand), hard-working farmers, are hoping to help him get over his various anxieties.
But perhaps it will take a family tragedy and a subsequent epic road trip through the treacherous wilderness, with the ever-presence of violence in the natural world and Mother Nature only occasionally benevolent, and loyal Spot by his side to provide the opportunity for Arlo to confront and overcome his fears and make some progress in the direction of maturity.
Parents and guardians who want life lessons and messages with their kidflicks will not feel cheated of same. But they're smoothly integrated into the narrative and absolutely appropriate given the target audience.
The voices of Sam Elliott, Streve Zahn, Anna Paquin and A.J. Buckley also turn up as T.rexes and Pterodactyls.
Debuting director Peter Sohn (a story artist on Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, WALL-E, and Ratatouille) employs both a photorealistic style and a painterly one, drawing visual inspiration for its breathtaking frontier landscapes from the American west depicted over the years on the movie screen.
The settings are so astonishingly convincing, it seems as if animated characters are being drawn on actual locations.
The emotionally resonant script, celebrating both family and bravery, spreads the western motif through the array of idiosyncratic critters and imposing creatures that Arlo and Spot encounter along the way, with several scary confrontations that may be too much for the youngest viewers.
Ultimately, this is a simple tall tale, admirably executed, that builds to an emotional climax that is disarmingly poignant and powerful.
So we'll fear 3½ stars out of 4 for a leisurely, uplifting, child-friendly story about friendship with visual delights galore and, it turns out, an understated title. The Good Dinosaur is better than good.
