★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
Pterodactyl sacrifice! Men and dinosaurs living together!
Mass hysteria!
Well, sort of. Pixar’s The
Good Dinosaur (after many, many years in the works) has finally arrived. We
follow young, fear-stricken Apatosaurus Arlo in his journey home after a
terrible event separates him from his family. Oh, and the asteroid that should
have killed the dinosaurs missed, so we’re joined for the ride by tiny counterpart
Spot, a scuffed and tousle-haired human toddler.
On a purely aesthetic level, this film serves one purpose:
if you are one of those people who sees no use in CGI, who thinks film-making
would be better if we went back to the seventies and refuses to let digital
worlds draw you in; this film exists to prove you wrong. It is visually flawless. We're talking animation so advanced that if you removed the bouncy
characters from the equation, there are moments where it could feasibly be shot
amongst real-life mountain ranges, across sweeping plains, on the shores of
pebbly-beached rivers.
Our companions through this extraordinary world are a mixed
bag: Raymond Ochoa and Jack Bright are undeniably sweet as double act Arlo and Spot, but Frances McDormand and
Jeffrey Wright feel a little thrown away in bit-part roles and Steve Zahn as
Thunderclap appears to be doing an impression of Sam Rockwell all the way
through. One genius piece of casting is Sam Elliot as a grizzled T-Rex cattle
driver, who makes the very best of an out-of-place yet sumptuous Western chapter. Yes, a handful of the characters are fun to be
around, but I just don’t think they’ll have the staying power that is the
hallmark of Pixar’s roster.
Having to play second fiddle to Inside Out can’t be an easy thing, and having such a troubled
production history doesn’t help. This unlucky combination of such an insightful
predecessor and a jumbled mix of plotlines and ideas is just unfortunate
happenstance: the film can’t help that it has nothing new to say. There are
interesting ideas in it (the original premise is essentially rather brilliant),
but they’re thoroughly underdeveloped, under-played in the comedy department and swept over by the gobsmacking vistas.
The story, too, has clearly suffered as a result of the
change of director and re-writes: when the predictability sets in and we find
ourselves traipsing through movements that even the child audience will have
seen before, director Peter Sohn and co. tend to fall back on sugary weepiness.
Yes, there is plenty of catharsis in the emotions, but again, it’s a lot of
what we’ve seen done better by films like The
Land Before Time, an animation which introduces extraordinarily important
and adult themes (that we’ve rarely seen since) into a kids’ dinosaur
adventure with charm and heartbreak to spare.
No, of course The Good
Dinosaur isn’t a bad film. There is not a soul on this Earth who could
possibly deny the beauty of the animation or the genuine emotional heft, even
if these mainly serve as stand-ins for a more substantial story and fresher characters.
The kids will be enthralled, but those of us who have come to expect greater
things from Pixar won’t be fooled: running along the front rows of the cinema
chopping onions is cheating, and they know it.
