Good Dinosaur Review

Oh Pixar. You give us great gems like Toy Story and Finding Nemo and you also give less than stellar attempts like Cars. This year was special, because we had two Pixar movies the first one was Inside Out and this month we had the Good Dinosaur. How does it hold up?

Well... Have you ever watched something and thought to yourself "What am I watching?" Not for anything obscene, but strange things happen that don't add up? That was how I felt throughout the whole movie.

It has a great setup with the idea "what if dinosaurs never died?" That being said this movie takes place in the here and now with very few humans in the world and dinosaurs are the dominant species. That I love. The amount of work they put in animating the scenery and the backgrounds, that I had to keep reminding myself it was animated. That I love.

Everything else fell way short. Some characters were enjoyable, but felt very paint by numbers and in order to keep things interesting they had to be shocking for shockings sake. Biggest examples include having Arlo and Spot getting high off of berries, decapitating a bug, actively killing off the villain, redneck inbred raptors, and the third most tragic death in Pixar history. That stuff would make more sense in an action story, but was quite jarring an animated film targeted towards children. Also thematically it felt very Western. In some ways it worked, but overall it fell apart.

So my best advice is just avoid this all together. Don't redbox it, don't rent/download/stream, whatever. It's not worth it.
So if you ask me, the only Pixar movie that came out this year was Inside Out. And no one can convince me otherwise.

Next time: Hunger Games: Mockingjay part 2.