In a year when Pixar released the incredible Inside Out, The Good Dinosaur had the tough challenge to keep up with the high standard. Unfortunately, it doesn’t get even close. And it’s no secret why the movie has so many problems with the script. Scheduled to be released in May/2014, the movie wasn’t considered good enough by Pixar executives, so it suffered major changes in the script (including changing almost the entire cast, firing a lot of animators and changing the age of the main character), with the subsequent delay until November/2015.

With an interesting premise (“what if the meteor that killed the dinosaurs millions of years ago had missed the Earth?”), The Good Dinosaur doesn’t develop such an interesting story. Arlo (Raymond Ochoa), the main character, is always afraid of absolutely everything, so he isn’t able to impress his parents as much as his brother and sister do. To his father’s (Jeffrey Wright) disappointment, Arlo can’t even do the simplest task he is assigned to do. After a series of events, he meets Spot (Jack Bright), a boy who lives alone and behaves like a dog (which is funny at first, but gets exhausting as the movie continues).

The film is visually beautiful, with breathtaking landscapes that don’t even look like they’re computer generated. The story, however, seemed to be an attempt of copying scenes that already worked in previous movies. For example, I could clearly see resemblance with The Jungle Book and The Lion King. The latter especially regarding the father/son relationship.

To sum up, it’s one of those movies that will be on my list of “watching it once is enough” and it’s definitely not among Pixar’s best films. It has a beautiful message, but it just wasn’t developed to its full potential. A side note: there is a scene when Arlo and Spot are eating fruit with hallucinogens effects that made me wonder why it was on the movie at all.

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Review: Brooklyn (2015) Movie Review: Inside Out (2015) Review: Anomalisa (2015) Review: Coco (2017)

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