Ranking Pixar: Number 20

Okay, so when talking about Pixar movie, I find it pretty hard to call any of them truly bad films. Even their weaker movies I’m typically able to find something to like about them. Something where I can say, “Well, it wasn’t a great movie, but I still got something out of it.”

There is no such thing with the unfortunately titled “The Good Dinosaur.” This is a truly terrible film and hands down Pixar’s worst film. This was one of the easiest decisions of the list, and even thinking about this movie puts a bad taste in my mouth.

Full disclosure, I did not see this in theaters. I remember seeing ads for this thing leading up to its release, then it was released to no fanfare, got a pretty middling reception, and then just went away. I couldn’t be bothered to go see it in theaters, so I just forgot about it until one fateful day when I decided I should finish out my education on Pixar films by watching it.

So let me start by saying that the concept, on paper, seemed good. The trailers and the opening of the movie paints an intriguing picture: what if the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs didn’t hit the Earth? So immediately, I’m thinking of something similar to “We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story” where it’s dinosaurs in modern day. While that movie… wasn’t great, done by Pixar, I was confident that they’d be able to get it right.

They did not. For the record, no, Pixar did not choose to go with the “Dinosaurs in modern times” thing. No, The Good Dinosaur was still set in prehistoric time, that whole setup was just so that they could create a timeline where dinosaurs and humans were on the planet at the same time. Yeah, that was the reason for that setup.

Pixar, I don’t know if you know this, but very few people in your audience will give any amount of a shit about how historically accurate your animated movie about talking dinosaurs is. Oh, there’ll be a couple of assholes out there who say “Weeeeeeeeeeeell, technically…” but seriously, suspension of disbelief, for those who knew about it and cared, would be more than enough.

But that’s just the beginning of this movie’s problems. Poor voice acting, poor writing, the movie isn’t funny, the characters are boring, the characters aren’t animated very well, and moment to moment, the movie ranges between boring and just unwatchable. Every scene has something about it that makes me furious, from how the main character’s dad gets blatantly Mufasa’d in the first act to the random and shockingly violent scenes spread throughout. A scene where the human child violently rips a large bug’s head off. Another scene where a pterodactyl’s take a cute, fluffy squirrel, and devour it alive right in front of the camera (its fluffy tail is hanging out of the pterodactyl’s mouth so that the others can pull at that), and another scene where the human child rips a large chunk out of the pterodactyl’s wing. They’re extremely jarring, and rather sickening. Certainly too much for what I assume is a pretty young target audience.

The entire message is fucked as well. The moral of the story is something about making your mark, or being brave or something… Christ, I don’t know, but they do a very poor job of setting it up, and an even worse job of conveying it.

I’m sorry, I know this is supposed to be a mini-review, I just have a lot to say about this movie. About the only good thing about this movie is that while the characters are poorly animated and look like crap, the background and environments are practically breathtaking. Not nearly enough to save the movie though, landing it at the very bottom of the list at number 20.