The Good Dinosaur or when Pixar hit rock bottom

The Good Dinosaur is the latest Pixar animated feature film, unfortunately. It is also one of the nominees for an Academy Award for Best Animated Film, also unfortunately.

It’s really hard to imagine that The Good Dinosaur came from the same company that released Inside Out just five months before in 2015, and has two Oscar nominations.There are two good things about the movie and one of them might not be as good because it really personal taste dependable. The first thing is that it’s short, about 85 minutes run time without end credits.

The second thing are the visuals of the movie, which at times has this hyper realistic landscapes display that look stunning even if you are not a hyper realism fan in animated film, however, what spoils this is the mixed animation quality, because the dinosaurs in comparison do have that “toyish and plastic” look to them, and makes the whole movie a weird mix of different animation styles.

Some spoilers below!

So, even if the asteroid that was suppose to decimate the dinosaurs missed the Earth, The Good Dinosaur is still quite the catastrophe.

The characters of the movie are cliched, already seen, hard to relate and even though the movie goes one tragedy after another by the minute, there’s no emotion. But mind you, there are cowboy T-Rexes (running as if they were on horses!), one trippy-hippy triceratops, and air-borne “bad guys” dinosaurs, also what appears to be drug addicted, buffalo stealing raptors. The trippy-hippy triceratops was the highlight of the movie and probably the most interesting minute of the entire thing.

What was really ridiculous though were the humans in the movie. I can accept the fact that in this imagined version of the universe humans and dinosaurs live side by side, BUT while dinosaurs are acting totally human (being farmers and cowboys) the humans walk like monkeys, howl like wolves and act like dogs! I am a grown up so I was expecting good and creative humor from Pixar, but there was none, and It would have been OK if the movie was good for children, say ages 4-10, and unexpectedly there’s this bloodshed going on when the flying swallowed this helpless critter, alive! That did not seem fun at all, and that’s not the least of it, like I said above the movie goes from one tragedy onto another, all feeling super realistic and scary. To sum it up, The Good Dinosaur is boring and too predictive for adults, while being very disturbing for kids.

The scene where the father of the dinosaur dies is even repeated about 30 minutes after the first time, as if we have forgotten it so soon!

All in all, the movie felt like Pixar has a bunch of interns in the studio, they gave them some money and said to them “do your best!” They’re best was ripping of parts from the Lion King and Ice Age in the worst imaginable way to create the worst animated feature film in decades.