The Good Dinosaur
Peter Sohn (2015)
Bear with me here.
The Good Dinosaur is not an obvious Western. It is, after all, about dinosaurs. But there is something off about the movie from the first scene we meet the protagonists. The dinosaurs live in a farm. Now, I am no paleontologist, but I did listen in school and I am pretty sure dinosaurs did not live in house-type shelters or farm the land - even herbivores. I could be wrong.
I dismissed this oddness at first as the eccentricity of one family of dinosaurs in an otherwise normal dinosaur world. But as the movie moves on to the second arc we meet new characters and it becomes evident that something is afoot. There are violent roamers of the wild who distribute their wanton violence on a whim, hillbilly cattle thieves and, most strikingly, a family of T-Rex herders. By the end of the movie you realise that, with the exception of the occasional ability to fly, all the characters are perfectly interchangeable with classic Western types.
You have your peaceful family of farmers, utterly isolated in a boundless wilderness ; desperados and gunslingers ; soft-hearted stone-faced strong men ; and the faithful animal companion.
The obvious question is Why would Pixar choose to animate dinosaurs rather than people then ? Is it just that it is funner and more Pixar-like to animate non-human characters ? That is not their way. There are always good reasons for them not to go the human route.
Toy Story is a story about humans ;
A Bug's Life beautifully exploits the richness of the diversity of insects ; etc.
But here the reason eludes me more. There is the tenuous rationale that Spot had to be human for it to work. Okay, I guess. And I suppose that they do take advantage of each dinosaur's particularities. But nothing in the dinosauriness of the characters makes them have to be giant lizards. It feels a bit unnecessary.
That said the film works, mostly. Arcs two and three competently develop Arlo as a character. When he crosses lines he never before dared it does not feel unearned but coherent. Perhaps more importantly, his relationship with Spot is just as, if not more, believable. We understand where the bonding between the two of them comes from and the emotion is genuine. Too genuine. There is a scene in the movie that is the most emotional devastating thing to come out of Pixar since the opening to
Up and another one towards the ending that is a contender for the title. Damn you Pixar, this was supposed to be second-class end of year work ; where is this coming from ?
That power, coupled with how well those two last arcs work, would propel
The Good Dinosaur much higher in the ranking of Pixar works if not for the first arc. It is hopelessly and cliché and infuriating ; especially when you consider what the studio can do, has done, does later in the movie. It centers on presenting us with Arlo who is thoroughly unlikable and
déja vu. His problem is almost pedestrian: his cowardliness makes him for all intents and purposes useless at everything. The narrative of the coward teenager who learns to overcome his fears and stand up to danger is not only one of the most overdone things in movies about children ; here it relies on a fallacious and irritating equivalence : Arlo is small and physically weak, therefore he becomes craven. I was annoyed by the causality if only because it was unnecessary ; and later because it became insulting. That a frail person should scream at the mere sight of any creature capable of moving is absurd and utterly grotesque when it happens to be a dinosaur facing chihuahua-sized animals.
For half an hour I was rooting for Arlo's siblings to bully him into oblivion so tiresome was he as a character.
Pixar never had such a weak, boring premise before. It usually goes for much deeper, clever themes. What gives?
But what comes later eventually washes away the bad taste, Arlo becomes more likeable and the film gets much better. Yet i neither forgive nor forget.
7/10 - Two thirds of a quite good moviePS: Did I mention how cliché
the father's death also was ? Honestly the entire story is very uninspired and pushes through only through effective emotion and good writing/directing.