The Good Dinosaur (2015)

Not for kids... Some point this is very sad. And horrifying.

There are two scenes in The Good Dinosaur which stand out for their brilliance. Both wordlessly capture the longing for family and home entirely through a series of simple gestures. It's a great shame then, that the rest of the film that surrounds these scenes is so muddled, cloying and mediocre by comparison.The visual aesthetic here is strange. The vistas and scenery are astoundingly beautiful and the film itself is a technical marvel. Yet the puffy character design looks like something one would find in a CBeebies cartoon, and is ill-fitting when the ground they walk on looks so lifelike.The unfocused nature of the visual design carries over to the story as well. Following a young dinosaur on this journey to get back to his family after being swept away in a storm, learning to bond with a young human boy on the way. The plot points are all rather predictable, which is no bad thing if the writing is strong and characters interesting. However, The Good Dinosaur meanders back and forth through various scenes with no apparent thematic connection to one another. An early standout moment involves the two companions eating dodgy fruit and going on a drug-induced acid trip. No, really.Otherwise, this film is a fairly sub-par re-telling of a well-known story that doesn't really warrant any further mention. The tone lurches back and forth between the cloying and the gruesome; the main characters just aren't very compelling; and the lack of real wit makes the dialogue tiresome to listen to. Were this a silent movie, there would be real potential for something unique and compelling. As it stands, The Good Dinosaur just a below-average Pixar movie.

I saw the movie now, the only reason I gave him 7 is that at some moments the film managed to excite me, but I think the plot is pretty bad. The characters in the film are actually good in my opinion, but have not exhausted their potential. In my opinion, this film has a lot more potential than what you see in the film, both in terms of the characters and in terms of investment. They invested a crazy $ 200 million in this film, favor. For the plot I would give 5.5 / 10, and the film itself - I give 7/10.

'The Good Dinosaur' is a fun kid's movie that has a few strenuous moments, but I saw it with a five-year-old and she was fine, so its PG rating for "some scenes may scare young children" is probably fair. Fairly simple plot - the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago just misses Earth, hence allowing mammals & dinosaurs to evolve and coexist.The story follows Arlo (Ochoa), an Apatosaurus, and his anthropomorphised family, of which Arlo's the runt of the siblings. Wright & McDormand are mum & dad, who spend their time farming. Arlo falls in the river and gets swept away and begins a quest to get back home and is aided by an unlikely partner - Spot (Bright) the human, who's really more of a puppy! Plenty of similarities to 'The Adventures of Milo and Otis' and 'The Lion King', with Arlo having to find his own courage before he can find his family.There's actually not that many dinosaurs (a few T Rex, Pteranodons, Velociraptor and Triceratops) as the film really sticks with Arlo & Spot. The backdrop they're set against, which looks like the mountains of Canada, is superb, with all the scenery seemingly vividly real - truly exceptional CGI, with the only things looking cartoony are the characters! Some sad bits, some funny bits and some lessons for good measure.