Chris At The Pictures

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.

When it was announced that Pixar (creator of undeniably some of the finest animated films ever made) was working on a film primarily concerned with human emotions, there really shouldn’t have been any surprise. After all, their entire back catalogue has dealt with emotions; what if toys could feel sadness, what if cars really did experience the joy of racing, what if monsters felt fear? With Inside Out, Pixar have gone meta on us and asked the big question: what if feelings had feelings?

The story of the film focuses on the headspace of Riley, an 11 year-old girl having to deal with moving to a new home, attempting to make new friends and accepting an imposing new environment. Her emotions and thoughts are translated into actions by way of five characters living inside her mind: Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust and Anger. Joy has primarily been in the driving seat, guiding the other emotions up until the big move occurs, when both she and Sadness are stranded in the depths of Riley’s mind, leaving the others in charge…with disastrous results. Thus begins an epic journey as Joy and Sadness are forced to work together in an effort to save Riley before her negative emotions destroy the meaningful parts of her mind.

Perhaps more than the massive visual worlds they forge for each film, Pixar are constantly meritorious when it comes to creating instantly memorable and well-cast characters, and Inside Out is no exception: each of the individual emotions are wonderfully brought to life: Amy Poehler is infectiously boisterous as Joy, Mindy Kaling is given free rein to do her thing as Disgust, and her Office co-star Phyllis Smith is expertly chosen to give voice to Sadness. Not only are these characters – plus the myriad of strange beings that pop up across Riley’s mindscape – memorable, but so relatable to the expressions of real-life emotions that viewers both young and old will be searching for signs of them in everyone they know.

Now, back to that wonderful world-building! Riley’s brain is Pixar’s most ambitious and abstract creation yet, where complicated ideas and complex concepts are given glorious physical form but never over-simplified for the sake of dumbing-down; it’s just taken for granted that children will recognise enough of their own experience to connect the dots. No depths of imagination are left unplumbed, be it the subconscious, the ‘Train of Thought’, or the vast chasms where forgotten memories lie.

And of course, all of this is realised in extraordinary accomplished animation, in which gorgeous primary colours threaten to pop right out of the screen and there is never a moment where visual quality is exchanged in favour of narrative focus or vice-versa. In addition, it’s encouraging to see that whatever developments have been made in the area of animation, the approach to humans in this film is consistent as it’s ever been, by which I mean they are recognisably human but not overtly so: you’ll find no uncanny valley, DreamWorks rubbish here!

The same level of attention is also paid to the narrative, finding relatable content yet also dressing it up in an appealing way. So while Inside Out deals intelligently (but not always delicately, and usually for the better) with difficult and fresh subject matter, it’s delivered in a familiar box. There are call-backs throughout the plot to the best of Pixar’s back catalogue: the opening is a mirror image to the first 15 minutes of Up, Joy and Sadness sneaking past a terrifying element of Riley’s subconscious recalls Buzz and Woody treading over Scud in Toy Story, and the factory-esque make-up of the halls of memory is the scare-floor from Monsters Inc. on a microscopic scale.

It’s been a long time since we’ve been gifted true Pixar at its most masterful (I think we can all agree that Cars 2 didn’t give the studio their finest showcase), and the time and effort spent creating a whole new world is clear for all to see. This is animation at its most beautiful, and children’s entertainment at its bravest.