The Good Dinosaur (2015)

Maybe it’s me. Maybe I just shouldn’t be allowed near CGI animated dinosaur films. I don’t know why this particular mircogenre of movies manages to so consistently stick in my damn craw. I, of course, have Dinosaur sitting proudly at the very bottom of my rankings of the Disney canon and I have every hope that it will remain that way for a long time.

And I would still gladly watch Dinosaur over The Good Dinosaur. Mainly because, I can at least watch Dinosaur from beginning to end. The Good Dinosaur is the second last movie on my requested reviews because I have put it off over and over and over again. I cannot finish this thing. It bores the piss out of me.

But, before we crack on, I want to explain why I’m not doing a full plot recap for this one.

I was feeling ever so poorly.I actually had a lot on this month. Um…I don’t know if you heard but some stuff happened.Still not entirely sure this isn’t my wife pulling off an amazingly ambitious prank.

3. This movie has practically no plot to recap.

4. Disney Plus was dicking me around something fierce, constantly crashing and freezing and making the experience of watching this movie even more interminable than normal. This, by the way, was also during Kimmelnacht so you can understand why I was eyeing my Disney Plus subscription with a steely eye and whispering…

So, not a recap, more a series of observations about why this fucking movie annoys me so much.

Or, y’know, a rant.

The Good Dinosaur is set in a world where the asteroid that caused the K-T extinction* missed and the dinosaurs continued living right to the present day. Oh, but humans also managed to evolve anyway. Presumably through magic.

Fine, fine, it’s a cartoon. If the movie wasn’t good I probably wouldn’t mind. Still though. Really dumb.

Anyway, Henry and Ida are two Apatosaurus farmers raising their three kids, Libby, Buck and Arlo. Arlo is our protagonist and the titular good dinosaur. Or so the movie says, lying tramp that it is. But before we get into the face that the movie should be called The Dinosaur Who Fucking Sucks, Actually let me touch on a bigger issue I have with the movie. The character designs. And I realise this will make me seem like an Unpleasable Ulmer because my criticism is the exact opposite of the one I made of the designs in Dinosaur.

That movie, if you’ll remember, was originally intended as being a rather grim and bloody nature documentary style movie before it was re-tooled into a kid’s film with talking dinosaurs. Problem was, it kept the original hyper-realistic designs and it didn’t work. Same way the CGI Lion King movies didn’t work. These super serious designs don’t match the wacky cartoon personalities of the characters.

The Good Dinosaur doesn’t have a problem with overly realistic character models. Oh no.

Put Fred Flintstone on this guy’s back and I wouldn’t blink an eye.

Now, I won’t lie. I fucking hate this. BUT. It’s not objectively bad. I may loathe this weird piss green rubber looking thing but ultimately that’s a matter of taste. What isn’t a matter of taste is the fact that they took this and then put it in an ultra-realistic environment.

There is absolutely zero stylisation in the backgrounds, to the point where you wonder why they didn’t just shoot them on location and animate the characters in. And the problem with that is that when you have Arlo falling into a river and being swept away, it looks like a gas station’s inflatable dinosaur mascot came loose from its tethers. There is just no way you can reconcile characters that goofy looking existing in this world.

But that’s all aesthetics. What about the actual story? Well, as I said Arlo is our main character and that’s a big problem because Arlo, at least in the first act of the movie, has two main character traits.

He is afraid of literally everything.He wants to crush a toddler’s head.

Now, the Loveable Coward is a trope for a reason but for it to work, the coward has to have some other positive trait. Cowardice on its own is not endearing to an audience. And sure, you can make a character who’s fearful sympathetic but that usually requires explaining exactly why this character is afraid. Arlo just hatches out of his egg and is afraid of literally everything. And after the seventh time watching this character fail to assert himself with a chicken and going “waaaaaaaah” like a sauropoden Hank Hill…it gets old, is what I’m saying. Oh yes, and then there’s the toddler murder.

So Arlo’s father Henry wants him to “make his mark” by doing something, anything, useful for the family farm at which point he’ll be allowed to leave his footprint on the family barn. He gives Arlo the job of trapping whatever animal has been raiding their supply of winter food, which turns out to be a small caveboy who we’ll name Spot because that’s what he gets named later.

Arlo ends up letting the caveboy escape from the trap and Henry angrily insists that they follow it into the forest. Whereupon, there’s a flash-flood, Henry goes to join the great circle of life and now Arlo’s family are facing winter without Henry’s help to run the farm. When the caveboy comes back for more food, Arlo blames the kid for Henry’s death and his goal, for a significant portion of the movie, is to kill this child. So, he’s trying to do something awful, but he is also utterly incompetent and unable to achieve his goal. You see why I find this character a less than compelling protagonist?

Alright, Arlo chases Spot into the forest, they both fall in a river, they get swept downstream and…that’s it, that’s all the recap you’re getting because you bloody know what happens next. You know Arlo will overcome his fear and grow closer with Spot and they’ll work together and overcome their obstacles together and blah blah blah. You could probably predict every story beat from this point to the credits. Okay, fine, you probably couldn’t predict the scene where they eat rotting fruit and proceed to trip absolute balls.

Jesus Christ those cheeks will haunt me.

I will admit there are a few interesting ideas here and there. For example, the family of T-Rex ranchers who’re driving their herd of buffalo across the plains. T-Rex cowboys, that’s a fantastic concept. Jesus, just make the movie about them!

Also, their little arms make them run like they’re holding the reigns of a horse and that makes me smile.

But it’s also very clear that there’s just…no shape here. I get the distinct whiff of several drafts of a script being sewn together. There’s a sequence where Arlo and Spot meet a weird Pterodactyl cult that tries to eat them.

And another where they meet some Velociraptor rednecks who try to eat them…

And I would bet serious money that these were at one point the same scene with the same characters that got repeated to pad out the runtime.

So, to sum up. It’s boring, it’s ugly, the lead is insufferable, it has maybe two original ideas in its head and in order to watch it I had to become marginally complicit in the slow death of American democracy.

Perhaps I treated you too harshly.

Animation: 07/20 

Technically good, but the stylistic mismatch between the super cartoony character designs and the ultra realistic backgrounds is like carsickness for the eyes.

Leads: 02/20

I kept praying for another asteroid to do the job right this time.

Villain: 05/20

I haven’t really mentioned Thunderclap, the Canadian, storm worshipping Pterodactyl who is honestly not as interesting as that makes him sound. In fairness there might be the potential for a good villain in here. But the scene where he suddenly eats a racoon alive is less “oooh, what a scary villain” and more “no, that’s not just responsible to put in a kid’s movie, what the fuck is wrong with you?”

Supporting Characters: 07/20

Sam Elliot plays a t-rex who has a monologue about drowning an alligator in his own blood. All seven points earned there.

Music: 05/20

Yeah, I even hate the score! Goddamn I’m salty today.

FINAL SCORE: 26%

NEXT UPDATE:   16 October 2025

NEXT TIME: Obviously, it’s not going to top Roger Corman’s masterpiece, but let’s give it a fair chance.

*Yes, I know we’re supposed to call it the “K-Pg” event now. Whatever, I still call ’em “Twitter”, “Turkey”, “Puff Daddy”, “Kanye” and “UFOs” now get off my damn lawn.