The Good Dinosaur

THE GOOD DINOSAUR   ***

Peter Sohn

2015

IDEA:  Dinosaurs continue to roam the earth after the asteroid intended to extinguish them passes by. In this alternate reality, a young, estranged Apatosaurus named Arlo befriends an orphaned human boy.

BLURB:  It seems entirely paradoxical, but The Good Dinosaur may very well be Pixar’s most formulaic film to date as well as its most unusual. For a studio renowned for its inventiveness and expansive imagination, it is unusual, firstly, because it feels so formulaic. Discarding a bounty of unique storytelling possibilities inherent in its intriguing premise, the studio ends up with a derivative journey-back-home narrative centered on orphans, interspecies friendship, and familiar themes of family and overcoming fear. Most unusual, though, is not the fact of this slim and uninspired narrative but what is foregrounded in its stead. The Good Dinosaur represents perhaps the first time Pixar has shifted its primary focus from story or even character and placed it on purely perceptual principles, drawing our attention to the meticulous optics of texture, light, and movement. Mountains, water, rocks, dirt, foliage, and various animal flesh are rendered with jaw-dropping, hyperreal tactility, becoming the film’s true content. They are observed with a reverence for the natural world seldom seen in mainstream Western animation. Even rarer is the film’s violent physicality, its lifelike sense of the effects of environment on bodies and its bizarre, at times comical fascination with somatic trauma. Where so much CG animation feels plastic and weightless, Pixar’s film is remarkable for how much it invests in corporeality and tangible physical expression, a gift for conveying through image that extends to the beautifully wrought central relationship. On one hand, The Good Dinosaur is a disappointingly undercooked piece of storytelling. On the other, it has freed up the technologically and artistically superior studio to indulge in its most lyrical work yet.