Breathtaking visuals meet heartbreaking reality in Pixar’s emotional boy-meets-dinosaur adventure

Since the release of Toy Story 20 years ago, it’s become clear that Pixar are the Django Reinhardts of strumming heartstrings. But it feels like we need a new word to describe the very particular blend of emotions that The Good Dinosaur stirs up.
The animation studio’s 16th film is a quietly exhilarating hybrid: part animal adventure, in the fine old Disney tradition of Dumbo and The Lion King, and part frontier survival story (think George Stevens’ Shane, or Sydney Pollack’s Jeremiah Johnson) where the morality comes as finely shaded as the mountain ranges that blush and glower in the ever-changing sunlight.
It makes you wince at the fragility of life while simultaneously welling up at the wonder of it – and that unexpected mixing of the sentimental and the existential left me feeling what can only be described as aww-struck.
Being the Pixar film that followed the studio’s widely praised and ingenious Inside Out was never going to be easy. But helpfully, The Good Dinosaur is almost nothing like its predecessor, and moseys off in a direction all of its own. The conceit, sketched out in a snappy opening sequence, is that the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs missed – and as such, the creatures have remained Earth’s dominant life-forms, learning to talk, build simple structures, rear animals and harvest crops over the millions of cosmically uneventful years that followed.
It opens on a family of apatosaurs living on a homestead in the shadow of the Claw Tooth Mountains – a jagged ridge which has more than a little in common with the Grand Tetons that were a constant, looming presence on the horizon in Shane. Momma and Poppa apatosaurs, voiced by Frances McDormand and Jeffrey Wright, are teaching all three of their offspring how to work the land, but young Arlo (Raymond Ochoa) is too timid to feed their chickens, let alone dispatch the “wilderness critters” – or humans, to you and me – that raid their corn store in the night.
Despairing, Poppa takes Arlo down to the river to follow the tracks of a pesky young homo sapiens and show him how it’s done. But in a flash flood, the pair are dramatically separated, and Arlo wakes up miles downstream and far from home. Just as getting back to the Claw Tooth Mountains alone begins to seem impossible, up pops a friend and guide: his name is Spot, and he’s the very same tousled young cave-boy Poppa was tracking.
Spot takes pity on Arlo and tags along, scampering at his feet, trying his best to wordlessly help wherever possible. In short, it’s a classic boy-and-his-dog story, except the dog is the boy, while the boy is 20 feet tall and bright green.
One of the things that immediately strikes you about The Good Dinosaur is its unusual visual style, which blends some of Pixar’s most flamboyantly cartoony characters to date with a breathtakingly realistic, mind-bogglingly detailed backdrop. But first-time feature director Peter Sohn resists the urge to send his virtual camera scudding down gorges and spiralling around mountaintops – instead using restrained, even classical pans and tilts to allow the landscapes’ own visual splendour to shine on screen. (Though the premise is similar-in-theory to DreamWorks’ How To Train Your Dragon films, the execution couldn’t be any more different.)
There are shots of raindrops bouncing off leaves and clouds curling around rocky ridges here that look like real-world documentary footage. While the realism allows Pixar’s artists to flex their graphical muscles in a very different way to, say, the fantastical landscapes of Inside Out, it’s also vital in cultivating the palpable sense of danger that pervades the film.
After the original Toy Story, Cars, Ratatouille and Brave, The Good Dinosaur is only the fifth of Pixar’s films to be rated PG in the UK, and its thunderstorms and mudslides are certainly intense enough to warrant it. And in line with its western influences, even the good guys can be pretty fearsome: for example, Butch, a grizzled Tyrannosaur rancher voiced by that western stalwart Sam Elliott, who talks Arlo and Spot into helping him and his clan chase off some velociraptor cattle-rustlers. (A typically subtle visual flourish: while the T-Rexes canter across the prairie, each one raises one of their stubby arms slightly, almost as if they were holding an invisible rein.)
Not every encounter along the trail packs quite the same thrill: a Dumbo-channelling hallucination sequence and an encounter with a styracosaur shaman and his collection of “pets” are both oddball highlights, while a group of unhinged, storm-chasing pterodactyls comparatively feels like peril-by-rote.
But the journey’s gradual reshaping of Arlo’s character is meticulously plotted, and its emotional climax – made around 100 times more heartbreaking for being entirely dialogue-free – is rigorously earned. The Good Dinosaur may not have much in common with the Pixar films that came before it, but the family resemblance is there wherever it counts.

Source: Telegraph.co.uk