The Good Dinosaur Review

When the first Toy Story movie debuted 20 years ago on November 22, 1995, it launched its studio Pixar’s particular brand of telling stories for children while still embracing hard, adult themes. Their bond is the best part of the film, and, with his dog-like antics, Spot steals every scene he’s in.

“The Good Dinosaur”, out on Wednesday, imagines a world where the large reptiles that roamed the planet weren’t wiped out by an asteroid and tells the story of an Apatosaurus named Arlo (Raymond Ochoa) who gets separated from his family when a great storm strikes. It plays out a classic boy-and-his-dog tale, only the dinosaur is the boy and the human is the dog.

“He’s a big family person, the family relationship comes through his (siblings) and when they fight I can relate to it because I have three older brothers”, Ochoa said during a recent publicity stop in Toronto. It’s some of the best animation Pixar has done.

Arlo and Spot encounter all manner of wonders and dangers out in the wild and they cross paths with other dinosaurs who, at first glance, you are never sure if they are going to be helpful or risky.

I will keep to my promise of maintaining a spoiler-free review of The Good Dinosaur and not give away too much, at least not more than what has been shown on trailers.

The main characters from “The Good Dinosaur” Spot and Arlo overlook the pristine valley created by Pixar animators. And coupled with a formulaic “find your courage” plot line, The Good Dinosaur simply retreads a lot of well-worn narrative and thematic ground.

“At Pixar we love entertaining audiences and to me, the kind of entertainment that I was always inspired by is the entertainment of Walt Disney”. “I feel like because they’ve never seen anything in a movie theater, they’d be terrified”.

Platitudes about fear, work, loss and independence abound; there are moments that hearken back weakly to other Disney and/or Pixar fare (think The Lion King and Finding Nemo).

Both of the concepts are solid, and director Peter Sohn finds several fun concepts within that framework, like a family of T. rex buffalo ranchers (with a patriarch voiced by Sam Elliott) trying to protect their herd from a pack of Velociraptor rustlers.

The Good Dinosaur is preceded by a short film, Sanjay’s Super Team, directed by Sanjay Patel and produced by Nicole Paradis Grindle.

At the start, “Arlo doesn’t understand this animal, and the animal is just being what it is: loving and a survivor and tenacious”, says Sohn.

More a series of episodes than a story that accumulates power over its running time, “The Good Dinosaur” begins as a family sitcom before becoming an open-range Western.

Go and see this at the theatre in 3D because it’s visually stunning.