More like Lassie than Jurassic Park

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This article was published 25/11/2015 (3947 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The premise of Pixar’s The Good Dinosaur puts a human boy in the sidekick role to the film’s hero, Arlo, a nervous young apatosaurus separated from his family.

That’s enough to make some audiences nervous creationists have scored a victory in Hollywood, getting a major movie to show humans and dinosaurs cavorting together in a tableau seemingly lifted from a creationist museum diorama.

In fact, for all its fanciful execution, the movie has a practical purpose. Kids love dinosaurs. But kids don’t necessarily want to see dinosaurs in the predatory context of a Jurassic Park movie.

So, in its opening minutes, The Good Dinosaur offers up a speculative escape clause: What if the meteor that wiped out dinosaurs millions of years ago missed our planet?

The answer to that question is that humans and dinosaurs might live side by side. The interesting twist is dinosaurs might have evolved into chatty hunter-gatherers, while proto-humans are still grunting bug-grubbers.

Hence, young Arlo (voiced by Raymond Ochoa) and his family, being of the vegetarian apatosaurus persuasion, maintain a stone house, a corn farm and even a silo. As on every farm, everyone contributes. But unlike his brother and sister, the runty Arlo is a fearful kid, unnerved even by the farm’s chickens (an understandable concern given that these are giant primitive poultry).

Arlo’s father (Jeffrey Wright) attempts to cure the lad of his pervasive terror, but only exacerbates the problem when he is carried away by a flash flood, leaving his son in an even frailer state. When Arlo himself falls into the river and ends up hopelessly lost, he attempts the journey back home with the assistance of a feral boy he dubs Spot.

At this point, director Peter Sohn hits a groove for The Good Dinosaur, designing it as an old-fashioned boy-and-his-dog story, except the dinosaur is the boy and the boy — a growling, howling, twitching omnivore — is the dog.

It takes place in prehistoric times, but Sohn puts a western spin on the story. Arlo and Spot must evade a gang of pterodactyl desperadoes. They fall in with a family of T-Rexes attempting to find their lost herd of prehistoric cattle.

The T-Rex patriarch, Butch, is voiced by Sam Elliott, and his laconic drawl should be a good indicator of the movie’s cowboy-twang overlay, but if that’s not good enough, the movie’s soundtrack by Mychael and Jeff Danna is filled not with thumping tom-toms but Americana-style guitar strumming.

Arlo’s appearance is unusually cartoony compared with the other characters, just one indication the movie’s diverse elements don’t always fit as neatly as one expects from the Swiss-watch precision of the Pixar brand. A couple of jokes are a little too sophisticated, and a scene in which Arlo and Spot vividly hallucinate after eating fermented fruit is liable to baffle or even scare the tot target audience.

But the overall effect of the film is more of the mellow high you get from an old-fashioned survival story, lushly produced with especially gorgeous natural vistas and a moving story touting the importance of family bonds.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca