The Good Dinosaur
Director: Peter Sohn
Voices: Raymond Ochoa, Sam Elliott, Anna Paquin, Jeffrey Wright, Frances McDormand
Three stars
The Good Dinosaur is Pixar's most trippy – and tripped-up – film. It is a wayward tale, uncertain of its steps, about a young dinosaur lost in prehistoric forests that are rendered in lushly sensory detail, and populated by bug-eyed animations.
Any animated movie worth its salt usually has something hallucinogenic about it. More often than not, Pixar has honoured that tradition, whether with the day-glo head trips of Inside Out or the ooo-ing aliens of Toy Story who, trapped all their lives in a grabber game, worship The Claw that might set them free.
But in The Good Dinosaur, director Peter Sohn and Pixar have, for the first time, wandered out into the wilderness. As if exhilarated by the open air, Sohn and his animators create such dazzling imagery of flowing water and mountainous landscapes that The Good Dinosaur might be most attractive to hikers.
Swept away by a river, Arlo (Raymond Ochoa), a timid Apatosaurus runt born to a family of farming dinosaurs, attempts to trek home with young caveman companion, Spot (Jack Bright). Their encounters with others in the wild are bizarre, like a kind of prehistoric Alice in Wonderland.
There’s a googly-eyed Styracosaurus with small animals living on his horns, and a pack of Pterodactyl storm-chasers addicted to the “higher elevation” of a hurricane. There’s even a psychedelic sequence in which Arlo and Spot accidentally eat some bad fruit: it’s like ‘Fear and Loathing in the Mesozoic’.
The screenplay, by Meg LeFauve, is from a story conceived by Bob Peterson (who was replaced as director by Sohn, a Pixar veteran making his feature debut), and is set in a parallel universe to ours.
In the movie’s opening moments, the asteroid that spelt doom for the dinosaurs in our world whizzes past Earth.
It's a concept that could have brought all kinds of interesting possibilities, but The Good Dinosaur makes surprisingly little use of most of them. Here, dinosaurs have developed into a partly-agrarian society (Arlo's family harvests corn) and the first Homo sapiens are pesky critters.
As his name suggests, Spot is more like a dog than a human – he resembles a two-foot tall, tongue-wagging Zac Efron.
But he is also more adept in the woods than the fearful Arlo, and the film’s most tender moments come during the wordless bonding between the pair of orphans as they navigate their way through terrain that appears modelled on the Rockies, somewhere near the geysers of Yellowstone.
If the story is uneven, the scenery is consistently pristine. Surely the reason Pixar pushed forward with this long-delayed film was so that its outdoor animations would see the light of day.
Water – whether in pebbly shallows, luminously reflected on stone walls, or welling up in the eyes of a homesick dinosaur – has never been more beautifully captured.
And though a host of films, from 127 Hours to Wild, have in recent years exalted the attractions of life on the trail, no film will better spur nature-lovers to head for the hills.
However, the best thing about The Good Dinosaur might well be the short that precedes it. In Sanjay's Super Team, by Sanjay Patel, a boy and his father sit on opposite sides of a room, each crouched in solemn devotion to the boxes in front of them: a TV showing a superhero cartoon for the boy, a cabinet for Hindu meditation for the father. In a few tender minutes, the short film bridges two worlds much more sweetly than the dinosaur-human pairing that follows.
