The
Good Dinosaur
is not about prehistoric beasts in the modern world. It has the fateful
asteroid miss Earth allowing dinosaurs to continue living at least long enough
to coexist with cave people. What happens when Homo sapiens comes along is anyone’s guess. The real question
though is, what’s the point? Beneath the gimmick of dinosaurs surviving in an
evolved Earth along with other strange creatures (clawed chickens, fanged
beavers, and the hairless two-legged kind) the alternate timeline matters
little to the plot. It is a simply a story of an interspecies friendship
between an orphaned cave boy and a kid dinosaur. But the boy could have been a
modern day child lost in the forest paired with any other animal living today
and virtually nothing would change. Don’t mention that the four-legged
companion is an extinct reptile and this is a virtual remake of The Journey of Natty Gann.
Making the star a dinosaur that can
walk alongside a child is regrettably little more than a ploy disguising the
lack of imagination throughout The Good
Dinosaur. It’s an attention getter that soon gives way to a banal story of
a mismatched pair’s journey home.
Would The Good Dinosaur have been better, even with its limited
creativity, had it been set when dinosaurs naturally ruled the earth, involving
the friendship between two different kinds of dinosaurs, say, a carnivore and a
herbivore? Probably, because, if nothing else, it would have been truly a movie
about dinosaurs, rather than a movie about a boy and his pet which arbitrarily
is a prehistoric beast.
In its earliest incarnation The Good Dinosaur seemed to be shaping
into such a film. But it became the longest postponed film in Pixar’s history
after director Bob Peterson was yanked away from the project in late August of
2013. Peterson’s concept seemed more in line with what Pixar does best.
“It's time to do a movie where you
get to know the dinosaur, what it's really like to be a dinosaur and to be with
a dinosaur,” he said.
Ironically, this seemed troubling to
Pixar President Ed Catmull. As producer Denise Ream explained, “Sadly, it
happens more often than any of us would like. The previous director, Bob
Peterson, just got stuck. It’s given a lot of thought and care. Bob still works
at Pixar, he’s a beloved member of the studio. He helps out on a lot of the
movies. We care about him, but he just needed help getting the movie done.”
For over a year the film went into
limbo until co-director Peter Sohn, a storyman behind Finding Nemo, Up, and
others was nominated as replacement director. Sohn initially seemed to be on
board with Peterson’s vision noting the kind of dinosaurs that would play in,
but somewhere along the turbulent production something got lost. The wrong turn
seemed to come when Sohn rerouted the direction into a buddy film. His new
story proposal got him the job.
“The heart of the story remains the
same,” Sohn said. “It's always been about this young dinosaur growing up. But
the world itself has changed a lot. Nature has become a character.”
“We had three different storylines
going on,” Sohn explained. “When I was asked to do this, it was to try and
refocus it to one and honor Bob’s original intent of a dinosaur movie with a
boy-and-dog concept. For me it was just like, ‘Boy, I love what Bob originally
pitched, just that boy-and-dog story, the sincerity in that.”
“A couple of things that did change
were like that the siblings were a lot older, they became younger, it was a
much more complicated story from the little that I know of the previous
history,” recalls Ream. “And when we reset the movie a lot of it was about
stripping away what had existed before or had gotten overly complicated and
going back to the real true essence of the boy and dog story. So I came on and
kind of shut the whole show down, which was very nerve-racking to a lot of
people, but we shut the show down and literally Pete spent September, October,
November and December solely working on the story and kind of iterating
treatment forms, script forms, and then we started re-boarding toward the
middle of December of ‘13.”
There were drastic changes
throughout, including an almost complete recasting of voice actors (John
Lithgow, Judy Greer, Bill Hader, and Neal Patrick Harris were dropped for
Jeffrey Wright, Steve Zahn, and Sam Elliott) and the planned release of
November 2013 was pushed back. Pixar entered a turbulent period in which five
percent of its staff was laid-off and Disney, with the success of Frozen, became less dependent on Pixar’s
hits. In light of this, a problematic end result is not surprising. The film
was postponed even further, leaving the studio without a 2014 release.
“Nobody ever remembers the fact that
you slipped a film, but they will remember a bad film,” Catmull said. “Our
conclusion was that we were going to give the film some more time.”
Still, the solutions seemed simple enough.Even
anachronism for the sake of anachronism would have worked better had The Good Dinosaur fixed on the core
concept of overlapping humans (even cave people) with extinct creatures. That
is, in part, what made The Flintstones
a hit (along with the groundbreaking concept of an animated sitcom aimed at
adults) and, for that matter, The First
Bad Man, the 1955 Tex Avery cartoon that inspired the series. Hanna and
Barbera had fun with the very concept of a cave men acting like modern humans
coexisting with dinosaurs that acted like dinosaurs. Dino, the pet snorkasaurs,
exemplifies what The Flintstones got
right and The Good Dinosaur got
wrong. There is nothing particularly funny about Dino’s doglike behavior-except
that he has all the physical characteristics of a dinosaur. Arlo, the titular
dinosaur voiced by Raymond Ochoa, is a dinosaur that becomes, in essence, a boy’s
dog and no pun is made on the fact that he is
a dinosaur.
Of course the story is so generic it
works for a dinosaur as it could for just about any animal. Arlo gets swept
away from home in a raging river while pursuing a wild cave boy that had been
raiding the family crops. On their journey back they bond and become boon
companions. But shouldn’t a movie that goes out of its way to explain dinos and
people coexisting make use of the traits specific to dinosaurs? The film’s
treatment of its reptilian stars brings back to mind Stephen Hunter’s
description of Disney’s Dinosaur for The Washington Post, “A Cretaceous Bambi”.
Humor may not be what The Good Dinosaur had in mind. Aside
from some mildly amusing creature inventions caught in an evolutional warp,
best of which is a triceratops-like dinosaur with camouflage ability, (and all
surpass the stars, the dinosaur and the boy ranking as the studio’s least
endearing creations) The Good Dinosaur
is Pixar’s most humorless film. Still, The
Good Dinosaur could have learned something from The Flintstones. As popular as it was, the sitcom lost ratings and
was unceremoniously cancelled at the end of the sixth season when it stopped
being primarily about modernized humans in the Stone Age and became instead about
banished aliens on Earth, time travel, and goblins moving in next door, the
town of Bedrock becoming a mere backdrop.
The
Good Dinosaur’s closest cousin is Ice
Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, a similar anachronism stew in which Ice Age
mammals end up in a world populated by dinosaurs. Let alone that it turned out
to be an underground world in which, due to fringe logic, the reptiles managed
to survive into the Ice Age. What matters is that the animators created a new
world fit for the king lizards and its inhabitants were dinosaurs in every way
movie dinosaurs should be dinosaurs. The result was the best entry in the
series.
In The Good Dinosaur the world looks very much like our own, the planet
having changed very much since the asteroid missed. The dinos have become the
dominant species, living an agrarian life much like early human civilizations.
After the first ten minutes or so we forget that they are dinosaurs, though,
since it matters little beyond the initial gimmick that they lived millions of
years after they were supposed to be wiped out. By the time we get to know the
central family they could easily be interchanged as bears, wolves, or even
humans with virtually no change to the plot.
In an interview, Sohn mentions what
in retrospect became the film’s downfall. It stopped being about dinosaurs and
became a boy’s own survival story, “If you put like a realistic dinosaur in the
woods, eat some leaves, you’re fine,” he said. “You’re an animal. But we really
wanted to play with that twist of this is a boy out there. A dinosaur boy for
sure, but trying to infuse those qualities into him that caricaturing the eyes,
caricaturing his look that for me as an artist, I love pushing those kind of
universal looks because he speaks a language and the dog doesn’t, we would rely
on those animation kind of moves and gestures that you would try to observe
when you don’t speak a language. And also keeping him in a world that had an
arc to itself. That it would start off being beautiful and then become
dangerous. When we had these designs of the trees where they were a little bit
more blocky and a little bit more graphic. We put Arlo in front of it, it’s
like ooh that kind of is cool, but boy, it doesn’t feel like it’s that
dangerous. Like when we get a rock stuck on him, it didn’t feel like anything
’cause when we went on our research trips, boy that idea of like you can get,
you could die by a small thing like having a rock on your foot. Or you could
die by a huge thing like an avalanche, which we tried to kind of explore in the
film. So that was one of our main intents.”
The scenery is often pleasant and is
the only area in which this really looks like a Pixar film, but it never
develops a style, shifting from a Midwestern homestead where Arlo and his
family reside to Fordian country where Arlo and his pet boy help a family of
T-Rexes round up their longhorns and battle cattle rustlers.
In fairness, Sohn detailed the great
lengths the crew went through to create a vivid landscape. “We did a lot of
research, going out to the northwest, Wyoming, Idaho and Oregon,” he said. “There’s
nothing to photograph, there’s nothing to put into the computer. There are
hundreds of artists that help make every blade of grass, every tree, every
rock, every drop of water. It’s all meticulously done.”
“The area has a fantastic variety of
landscapes, ranging from the Jackson Valley and the Tetons to the amazing
geysers and waterfalls in Yellowstone,” production designer Harley Jessup said.
“We studied the grasslands of Montana and the Red Desert, then incorporated all
of it in Arlo’s journey.”
Ream described the process in detail, “From
the get go Pete basically said, “I don’t want it to feel just like a walk in
the park. I want it to feel really expansive, like it could go on and on
forever.” And so that’s when Sanjay Bakshi, our supervising technical director,
came up with the idea of using the USGS topological survey data, so we used
that as sort of the starting point to get this really expansive feeling. And so
of course that’s not hard but then getting to dress it all with trees or rocks,
it looks photo-real but it is slightly stylized, so we still had to build and
create everything. So how we had to dress and populate all of that terrain was
complicated, and so that was a big challenge. This is also the first time that
we’re using volumetric clouds in every single shot, usually a lot of them are
map-painted or you pick moments when you’re gonna use the volumetric clouds,
but in this movie, again, because we were outside we wanted it to feel
immersive we made the choice to do all volumetric clouds. Even ILM said we were
crazy to do it when we talked to them about it. And I was a little skeptical
but it ended up being the right thing to do and we ended up kind of building
this huge library of these 3D clouds and we kind of set-dressed them and they
did a really amazing job; so that was a big challenge. The other thing,
honestly, was I felt because there’s not much dialogue as we typically have in
a Pixar film, I wanted to give an animation as much time as possible to create
the performance, so carving out that time. We actually did something different
how you sign the work so people could have continuous runs of footage rather
than sort of piece meal, in order to create this consistent performance, which
I think once you see the whole film you’ll really be able to recognize that.”
Even in its prettiest moments, however,
there is something disconcerting about a world in which we don’t know quite
when or where we are. It seems to be around the time Neanderthals walked the
earth, though dinosaurs are the hut dwellers, but everything seems off. The
mammals we see here aren’t mammals we recognize from our knowledge of the time.
Instead of wooly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers we get strange creatures out
of a mad scientist’s lab. If humans evolved at the same pace even with the
extended survival of dinosaurs why not the other mammals? What are we looking
at exactly? The movie is in a Land of the
Lost type world but doesn’t know it.
Box-office results are influenced by
an array of factors and, for holiday releases, competition is always a
challenge. Even so, the box-office results indicate a certain detachment
audiences accustomed to the Pixar magic felt for The Good Dinosaur.
Erik Handler, an MKM Partners
analyst observed, “It’s not resonating like a typical Pixar film. It’s on a
path where they’re going to need home entertainment to drive profitability.
Usually with Pixar, by the time they’ve gone through the first window, they’re
in the black.”
Playing in front of The Good Dinosaur was a trailer for the
following summer’s Finding Dory. One
should always be cautious of sequels to masterpieces, but given how it promises
a return to the Pixar form we love, the beauty, the imagination, the humor, one
cannot be blamed for feeling a rush of excitement.
