The Good Dinosaur is Pixar's most disappointing film

Note that it's not the "worst" — it's technically accomplished, visually stunning, and certainly better than Cars 2, at the very least.



But even though Pixar and the prehistoric era should have been a natural fit, The Good Dinosaur is hollow on a storytelling level, mostly cobbled together from other, better sources. It feels like a patchworked compilation of a dozen screenplay drafts (complete with five people credited for coming up with the film's "story" — the outline that eventually becomes a full script).

This reflects the film's troubled production process, during which its original director, Bob Peterson, was removed in 2013 and replaced with current director Peter Sohn. While Pixar has survived such directorial shake-ups before (most notably on the sublime Ratatouille), it's evident from the earliest that nobody ever quite knew what The Good Dinosaur was supposed to be.



If there's a reason to give The Good Dinosaur a mild recommendation (and I give it the very mildest of recommendations), it's the film's visual excellence. You'll see plenty of reviews that highlight the photorealism of the movie's scenic backgrounds (taken from real US Geological Survey data of the American West!). However, while they're certainly far more naturalistic than anything Pixar has done before, saying they're photorealistic is not quite accurate. No, these are the grand vistas of the West as we might expect them to look, with every single beam of sunlight carefully positioned and every shrub artfully placed. The whole thing has the feel of a landscape painter tweaking nature just so.

These backdrops mesh well with the film's more stylized and cartoon-y main characters, beings that were very obviously generated by a computer. Something about the bright green main dinosaur Arlo moving across such precisely maintained landscapes just works, and that's to say nothing of the film's other neat visual flourishes, like a shot of pteranodon wings cutting through clouds like shark fins cresting above the sea.

Unfortunately, these sumptuous images don't entirely carry through to the story's visual logic. The center of The Good Dinosaur's plot involves Arlo being swept far from home after an accident. He'll have to embark on a long journey back, a trip that will comprise the bulk of the film's running time. So far, so good.

But Sohn and company never give us any real sense of Arlo's trek. It's fine if we don't know how exactly how far he is from home, but it's a problem if we can't get any real sense of how far he's traveled. That's the sort of thing that can easily be conveyed visually — via geography, or even simple landmarks. Yet, by the time Arlo gets within spitting distance of home, it's hard to figure out how much ground he's covered — or if he arrives when he does simply because it's time for the movie to end.

However, this is a minor quibble in the grand scheme of the film. Far more egregious is the fact that The Good Dinosaur ripped off many, many other movies in hopes of coming up with a coherent story.