Difference between revisions of "The Good Dinosaur"

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The Good Dinosaur

An egg that hatched both too early and too late.

Genre:	Animation Comedy Drama Adventure
Directed By:	Peter Sohn
Written By:	Meg LeFauve Bob Peterson (original idea)
Starring:	Raymond Ochoa Jack Bright Sam Elliott Anna Paquin A.J. Buckley Steve Zahn Jeffrey Wright Frances McDormand
Photography:	Color
Cinematography:	Sharon Calahan (camera) Mahyar Abousaeedi (lighting)
Distributed By:	Walt Disney Pictures
Release Date:	November 10, 2015 (Paris) November 25, 2015 (United States)
Runtime:	94 minutes
Country:	United States
Budget:	$175 million
Box Office:	$332.2 million

The Good Dinosaur is a 2015 American computer-animated comedy-drama adventure film produced by Template:Greatest and released by Walt Disney Pictures. It was directed by Peter Sohn in his directorial debut and written by Meg LeFauve from an original idea by Bob Peterson.

Plot

In an alternate history where the asteroid that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs passed safely over Earth instead, a lost Apatosaurus named Arlo befriends a Neanderthal boy named Spot. Together, the unlikely duo embark on an adventure to reunite Arlo with his beloved family.

Bad Qualities

The film's production was troubled and the higher budget that ensued is one of the reasons why it failed at the box office.
- It was also released in a time of multiple large-scale film releases such as The Hunger Games: Mockingjay: Part 2 and Creed, which didn't help the box office numbers.
Arlo, for the most part, is an unlikable and annoying protagonist. His screams can be irritating to many viewers.
The film does nothing with the simple concept of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs missing is completely irrelevant to the plot, especially considering that no dinosaurs feared that the asteroid would hit the Earth itself.
The film's tone is too juvenile, especially since Template:Greatest Template:Greatest usually had their dark moments.
The film itself is very unoriginal, up to the point of leaving many critics, and audiences wondering if Pixar was still in a dark age.
- Particularly, Arlo's father dies in a very similar way to Mufasa in Template:Greatest.
- There are also some cliches in the film that have already been used before.
A confusing plot with an initially slow pace, the latter of which ends when Arlo and Spot start to bond.
Many of the characters in the small cast were wasted as they get no development time and get shoehorned only for around one scene.
While good, the character designs could've been more realistic to blend with the environment, or the other way around (the environment could've been simplified to match the style of the character designs).
The bizarre hallucination scene can be disturbing for younger audiences.

Good Qualities

The animation is a big improvement over Pixar films past, complete with lens flares.
The voice acting's good, as expected with other Pixar films.
Great musical score from Mychael and Jeff Danna.
The premise, despite its simplicity, was actually a good idea and could've been used better.
- Likewise, the film could've been better if the crew had some more time working on it and pushed the film's release date back.
Nice character designs despite clashing with the photorealistic environments.
The scene where Arlo and Spot part ways is rather touching.
Arlo goes through some decent character development.

Reception

Despite The Good Dinosaur received generally positive reviews from critics and some fans alike, many people considered the Pixar's weakest film since Cars 2. The review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a rating of 76%, based on 202 reviews, with a rating average of 6.6/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "The Good Dinosaur delivers thrillingly beautiful animation in service of a worthy story that, even if it doesn't quite live up to the lofty standards set by Pixar, still adds up to charming, family-friendly entertainment." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 66 out of 100, based on reviews from 37 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews." Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A" on an A+ to F scale.

Critics on the film were left divided over whether the film is a weak spot in Pixar's comeback phase that either happens to have a rather simple story or a confused/cliched embarrassment to the studio and proof that Template:Greatest was a fluke while Pixar was still in a dark age, with none in-between.

Box office

The film made a domestic gross of only $120.4 million and worldwide gross of $331.8 million out of a $175 million budget, becoming Pixar's first box-office bomb.