The Good Dinosaur

The Good Dinosaur (2015) was Pixar's most troubled production and it shows. The premise is simple: what if the asteroid had missed and the dinosaurs had never died out. The film inverts everything from there; the dinosaurs farm and the humans behave like undomesticated animals. Arlo is a frightened Apatosaurus. He loses his father, is swept far from home, and has to get back. Travelling with him is a human child who does not speak, whom he names Spot. The production was difficult. The director was replaced, the release was pushed back by eighteen months, and the story was rebuilt from scratch. A restart on that scale is rare at Pixar, and the film became one of the studio's weakest commercial results. Against that, the visual work is extraordinary. The backgrounds were generated from real geographic data; the rivers, rock and cloud are close to photographic. The characters are drawn in the opposite direction, in very simple shapes. The contrast is deliberate and struck many viewers as strange. The best passage has no dialogue at all: the scene where Arlo and Spot describe their families to each other contains no words. It runs 93 minutes. Good for: family viewing, animation, and the natural world. Less good for: it is darker than expected for small children, a parent dies, and some sequences are frightening.