Pixar's latest animation offering is The Good Dinosaur. It is promoted as exploring what would have happened if the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs didn't happen and dinosaurs and humans co-existed. In reality, it doesn't really explore this question at all.
The story follows the child of some dinosaur farmers. One day, a human child appears and scares him. This indirectly causes his father to die. When the human child shows up again, the dinosaur chases him and gets lost in the wilderness. While he is the wilderness, he meets new friends and enemies and must learn to conquer his fear.
This movie is a solid movie. it shows the characters developing (mostly). You follow the journey of the dinosaur as he learns to overcome his fear. The human child is not really developed much, being instantly trusting of the dinosaur. Also some cool characters (such as the triceratops) are put in and never show up again.
However, this movie never really does anything risky. It treats dinosaurs as part of an old west type society (farmers, ranchers, scavengers) with no real twists on the formula. The human child acts like a dog. It might be that they wanted to play it very safe to make this a holiday movie for the family.
It has to be said that the animation and landscapes are superb, with sounds to match. The Pixar team also did a very good job on the dinosaurs. They really thought about the difficulties in how they are meant to do some things without hands and show some inventive ways of how they do things.
In conclusion, this is a solid movie with some beautiful animation and sounds. However, the actual story behind it is very generic. If you replaced the dinosaurs with humans, you wouldn't have lost much in the movie, which is unfortunate.
2 out of 5 prehistoric waffles.
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