The Good Dinosaur

The Good Dinosaur, 2015

Directed by Peter Sohn, 93 minutes

Jeffrey Wright, Frances McDormand, Raymond Ochoa, Jack Bright

Review by Katherine Scheetz

              With phenomenon Inside Out (2015) grossing $90 million in her opening weekend, The Good Dinosaur (2015), at a mere $39 million on its Thanksgiving day release, is the starving artist, still-discovering-myself sibling at the holiday table in a family of engineers. Which is a shame, really, because there are elements of The Good Dinosaur that are genuinely a pleasure.

              Visually, it meets all the standards of an enigmatic Pixar piece: from pudding-like mud upon the silo and wind-swept fields freckled with longhorns, to the effervescent moment of fireflies bubbling up around Arlo (Raymond Ochoa) and Spot (Jack Bright, ). It is saturated with doe-eyed, pre-historic creatures and all their caricatured oddities. But it doesn’t exceed expectations, a grave that Disney-Pixar dug themselves into.

              In terms of atmosphere, composing brothers Mychael and Jeff Danna deliver a deliciously wholesome score, full prairie fiddles, piping Mexican standoff hums and deep horns evocative of rolling Midwest hills. Danna and Danna are, as usual, not afraid of taking non-traditional instruments and non-traditional sounds whether that be steel drums, Gregorian chants or Middle Eastern mandolin, in order to create the desired effect. If nothing else, this film is a lesson in how music informs the entire mood of a film. What makes the story relatable is the good-ole-American Manifest Destiny feel of the score. Without that, this is just an updated Land Before Time (1988).

             

The storytelling is cliché, to the point where we can’t stop ourselves from sighing when Dino-dad is washed away in the most Mufasa-like imitation that Disney should be suing itself. While the cast has done well with their voices, embodying each prairie-home-companion dinosaur personalities, the characters are simplistic, merely a representation of an archetype within the narrative.

              All these can be forgiven, as archetypes, caricatures and straightforward storytelling can be instructive and self-reflective. But the overabundance of morals leaves us bogged down with confusion. In between the mixed signals of advice from Poppa (Jeffrey Wright), lessons learned on the road and dream-induced flashbacks, the meanings of most of these messages gets lost. That being said, at the end of the film, one lesson does make it through the fog: when you are able to let go of judgment beautiful things can happen.

And I will say this: The longhorn droving T-Rex family nails it. Two words: bug harmonica.

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