Pixar's 'Dinosaur' a heartwarming comedy
Talk about blind casting.
Pixar's 3-D animated feature "The Good Dinosaur" shakes up the conventional "boy and his dog" adventure by casting a lovable prehistoric longneck in the boy's role, then making the boy take the canine's part.
That's only the start of a nutty, comically skewed riff on Don Bluth's prehistoric tale "The Land Before Time" where the rules don't apply.
Remember that fateful meteor that crashed into the Earth and killed off the dinosaurs?
In Peter Sohn's delightful "The Good Dinosaur," the meteor misses, enabling the prehistoric beasties to survive along with humanoids and even learn to speak English.
The main characters in this story belong to an Apatosaurus family.
Little Arlo (voiced by Raymond Ochoa) hatches as the offspring of proud Poppa (Jeffrey Wright, clocking more time than he did in "Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2") and Mama Apatosaurus (Frances McDormand).
His two siblings excel at their farm chores (yes, these are agrarian dinos). Not Arlo.
Poor little guy turns out to be a scaredy-sabretooth-cat afraid of bugs, weather and everything. Poppa tries to help.
"I just wanted you to try to face your fear!" he says, sounding like a life coach on an old episode of "Oprah."
It ruins nothing to know that poor Poppa gets swept away during a terrible storm and flood. (Shades of Mufasa's horrific demise in "The Lion King.")
Lost miles away from home, Arlo forges a reluctant friendship with a Neanderthal kid (Jack Bright, emitting noises but not words).
The wild child scampers around on all fours, growls and gnaws on old bones (whose?). He responds to one name: Spot.
Arlo and his sidekick set out to find a home in a frightening world filled with terrible predators, especially a flock of scavenger pterodactyls led by Steve Zahn's Thunderclap, whose interest in asking Arlo "are you injured?" masks an unsettling motivation.
The snaggletoothed raptors roaming the land like the hyenas in "Lion King" are just as dangerous.
Just when "Good Dinosaur" threatens to become a not-so-good derivative movie, Meg LeFauve's screenplay (assisted by four writers) pulls another cast fast-one by introducing three fearsome tyrannosaurus rexes as prehistoric cowboys protecting their buffalo herd from danger.
The three (led by Sam Elliott's baritoned leader Butch) even break into horse-like gallops to the strains of a sound-alike Western movie score provided by Mychael Danna and Jeff Danna.
This all makes for a family-friendly film bursting with highly detailed, photo-realistic scenery, featuring the best animated water ever created for the big screen. You'll even feel wet.
Having said that, "The Good Dinosaur" doesn't come close to the originality and sharpened writing that permeate Pixar's earlier film this year, the innovative and literal brain comedy "Inside Out."
"Good Dinosaur" recycles familiar bromides and dramatic scenarios (it even riffs on the drug-induced hallucination scene in "Dumbo" when Arlo and Spot munch on fermented fruits).
But it earns its laughs, and director Sohn wisely takes a tip from "WALL-E" and "Up" by employing two silent set pieces, one that projects the pathos of friends missing their deceased parents, and another testifying that parting is such sweet sorrow.
Give those Pixar people apatosaurus on the back for this one.
“The Good Dinosaur”
★ ★ ★ ½
Starring: Raymond Ochoa, Jeffrey Wright, Frances McDormand, Sam Elliott, Steve Zahn, Anna Paquin
Directed by: Peter Sohn
Other: Walt Disney Pictures release. Rated PG. 100 minutes