The Good Dinosaur, 2015.
Directed by Peter Sohn.
Featuring the voice talents of Jeffrey Wright, Frances McDormand, Marcus Scribner, Raymond Ochoa, Jack Bright, Steve Zahn, Mandy Freund, Steven Clay Hunter, Anna Paquin and Sam Elliott.
SYNOPSIS:
In a world where dinosaurs and humans live side-by-side, an Apatosaurus named Arlo makes an unlikely human friend.
For years, Disney has been mining the road movie for kids. From Pinocchio to Finding Nemo, Disney characters have gone through the wringer looking for their way back home, and the Disney/Pixar animated film The Good Dinosaur has a gangly Apatosaurus named Arlo severely dislocated from his patch of the world and family, but he embarks on the adventure of his young life as he makes his way back to the beginning, and redeeming himself in the process.
The Good Dinosaur hinges on a gimmick: What if the cataclysm (an asteroid) that wiped the dinosaurs out never happened? What if dinosaurs kept on living on into infinitum and managed to co-exist with cave people in a friendly-ish fashion? A crucial relationship in this film is between Arlo (who loses his dad in a traumatic scene) and an orphan feral kid. They keep each other company in the midst of perils, and both of them are essentially finding their way back to a family. It’s a gimmick that mostly works because it envisions itself as a pseudo frontier drama with dinosaurs as settlers on a vast, unexplored Earth, and The Good Dinosaur on the whole is a more than adequate, if simplistic, adventure geared for a young viewer set.
For whatever reason, the film didn’t do the kind of business Pixar/Disney films usually enjoy doing at the box office. I’m sure it will find its audience on home video, and now that the film is available to own on Blu-ray and DVD combo packs (where it looks pretty great, admittedly) the film will hopefully find its deserved recognition as a family film that might recall the grandeur of something like The Rescuers Down Under (which I really like). With its frontier-era flavored music score (by Jeff and Michael Danna), state-of-the-art CGI animation, and prehistoric settling, it’s certainly (at least to me) more palatable than the clunky movie The Croods. With a plethora of documentaries and supplemental special features, this combo pack is a solid release and worth adding to the collection.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★
david j. moore
