The Good Dinosaur (3/5 Stars)

When Jerry Seinfeld spoke about making a twenty-minute television episode he described it like running with an egg. That is to say there is this obstacle course one must cross all the while holding on to this very fragile thing and at any point in the obstacle course this very fragile thing could drop and be ruined irrevocably. To reiterate, everything from idea to writing to preproduction to directing to acting to editing to final presentation must be done perfectly. A misstep in any part of the process will render the final product inferior. When a movie fails completely it becomes clear that mistakes were made at most parts of the process. When a movie fails inexpliacably (or say tragically) you can almost sense this heroic effort being undone by a single weak link far along in the chain. Almost never do you see a movie fail the way that “The Good Dinosaur” fails. It’s marketing was perfect, its editing was seamless, it’s animation a pinnacle of the art, it’s casting and voice acting totally fine. Even the writing is not all that bad. No, what went wrong is the idea. The premise of “The Good Dinosaur,” is the problem. Imagine if you will somebody breaking the egg at the first obstacle in the course and then proceeding to run the rest of the way all the way to the finish line with a broken egg. The time to stop production of this movie was during the pitch meeting.

The premise for this movie is that the meteor that killed the dinosaurs missed the earth and that the dinosaurs survived to be able to meet humans millions of years after. That’s not the problem. The problem is that the movie takes this imaginative leap with the dinosaurs that is not intutitive. For instance, the movie starts with a family of Apatasaurs. There is a Dad, a Mom, and three kids (one of which is our cowardly hero Arlo). They are farmers. They grow corn and talk about storing enough grain for the winter. This does not make sense. The main reason is that they have not evolved past anything that looks like Apatasaurs. That is they are still very big, move along on all fours, and do not have hands that can grasp anything. And yet they have somehow built a house and a granary and plow the ground with their noses. The most absurd thing is that they are vegetarians and live in a forest and instead of eating the trees around them are planting itty bitty things of corn. Animated movies always take a certain leaps when they anthropomorphize animals, but this can only go so far. For instance the fish in “Finding Nemo” talked and had dreams and anxieties but they never ceased being fish. What makes the best films of Pixar work is that recognition the audience has when they are presented with the fanciful. Sure, there are not actual emotional beings in our head at a control panel but if there were, it is conceivable that they would work the way they do in “Inside Out.” Wall-E gained a personality over several thousand years but he never ceased being a trash compactor. In “The Good Dinosaur,” the dinosaurs are no longer dinosaurs. The Apatasaurs are farmers but there is no intuitive reason why Apatasaurs would become farmers. And there is no intuitive reason why Tyrannasaur Rexes would become cowboys on a cattle trail. And there is no intutitive reason why Velociprators would become redneck cow stealers. All of this is very well committed to (the nicest touch has to be the casting of Sam Elliot as the father T-Rex) but because none of it seems more than arbitrary the movie has this aura of strangeness that permeates every scene. There are no “Aha!” moments. It is more like, “okay I guess we are doing this now.”

So the movie does not work on a fundamental level. At the same time, it has got to be some sort of pinnacle in animation. In fact, I can see why the sunk cost fallacy of this idea perhaps had so many legs. The storyline has to do with Arlo, the yound apatasaurus, becoming lost and having to find his way home through the wilderness. The animators at Pixar were grandly inspired to say the least at the challenge of composing an entire movie’s worth of landscape scenes. You almost never see this in an animated movie because I expect it is an excruciatingly hard thing to do. I mean imagine drawing a mountain and taking the time to draw every goddamn tree on it. Or drawing a churning river and making the water look like real water. In fact, nature in this movie is so grand and ever present in large epic ways that it is fair to call it the antagonist of the story. I have no idea how this movie was made but I would not be surprised if Pixar did a lot of groundbreaking innovating here. I really wish the egg had not broken at the start line.

One may want to give Pixar a shout out for making an original movie at all. They have so many great brands in their catalog that they could (and have plans for) moneymaking sequels ad infinitum. “The Good Dinosaur,” directed by first timer Peter Sohn encapsulates the reasons big studios can be so risk adverse. It is very hard to take to spend several hundred million dollars on a movie and have it come out subpar. Then again, this year’s “Inside Out” is the flip side to that. It was also an original and it hit the big time. In a year that Jurassic World broke box office records it would have been fair to assume it would be the other way around. William Goldman once had something to say about that. Keep making original movies Pixar, pretty please.

p.s. Thanks for the druggy scene. That was funny.