THE GOOD DINOSAUR

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.