The Good Dinosaur review: A typically cute Pixar film that everyone can love

Pixar’s movies are not just movies – they’re yearly events. The reason why they’re so loved by audiences is that they take relatively smart concepts and package them into simple storytelling with tremendous visuals.

The Good Dinosaur, like all their films, despite being presented as an animated movie for kids, often crosses over to really dark adult movie territory thematically. With Inside Out and now The Good Dinosaur, it’s a double delight to have two Pixar movies in one year, even though the latter is far more conventional.

Once again the story hook is high concept – what if the asteroids didn’t hit the Earth and dinosaurs continued to roam freely? Arlo (Raymond Ochoa) lives with his dinosaur family in a beautiful meadow next to a river and a mountain. But when a little feral boy named Spot turns up things go horribly wrong, and Arlo and Spot get lost in the wilderness. As Arlo makes his way back home he has to confront all his fears and forgive Spot for putting him in a spot.

As you no doubt have guessed, the story is far more simplistic than Inside Out, and on that front it’s a little disappointing. Bear in mind that Inside Out raised the bar so high that even really good animation films from Pixar or any other studio are going to seem flaky in comparison. But The Good Dinosaur proves than there is beauty in simplicity. This is the kind of film everyone would find easy to love. The lead dinosaur is cute, the little feral boy is cute, their fights and their bonding is cute. The only really jarring moment in the film is the melodrama surrounding Arlo’s mom who suddenly turns into a dinosaur version of Mother India ploughing fields. But the rest of the film, and even that moment, is just so lovable it’s hard to nitpick things.

In fact there’s a lot to admire in the film. This is not the least bit hyperbolic – The Good Dinosaur has the most advanced computer animation ever put on screen. The photorealism is so insane some of the images look like real locations rather than drawn animation. So when Arlo frolics around the fields, forests and mountains it makes you wish you lived in this pristine, untouched version of the Earth that wasn’t destroyed, deforested and polluted by us humans.

The film also renders an interesting evolution theory - if the asteroid missed the Earth, the dinosaurs would evolve and become far more intelligent than just four legged animals. They’d probably be smarter than even humans. This little trick subverts the cliché of animals talking in an animated movie. All the dinosaurs in the film speak in English – the human ironically speaks in caveman grunts. The dinosaurs have discovered farming, the human has barely discovered walking on two limbs instead of four.

But despite this vocab switch the dialogue doesn’t do much more than spoonfeed things to the audience. The film works best in the scenes without any dialogue – the visuals are so powerful they either warm your hearts or bring some onions close to your eyes, and sometimes both. Dialogue was not needed in any scene. Had this been a totally silent film it would have become a real masterpiece. For now, this is merely a really good film that everyone should go and watch to have a good time. Just remember there’s a scene where Arlo draws a circle in the sand with his tail around Spot – good luck keeping your eyes dry.