Pixar’s 2015 release The Good Dinosaur opens on a quiet premise: the asteroid that would have caused the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event passes harmlessly by Earth. Dinosaurs survive, and one family of Apatosaurus takes up farming. The film follows Arlo, voiced by Raymond Ochoa, who lives on a corn farm with his parents and two siblings and cannot seem to earn his place.
Peter Sohn directed. Meg LeFauve is credited among the writers, alongside Bob Peterson, Kelsey Mann, Erik Benson and Sohn. The film runs 93 minutes. It is an adventure, animation and family picture from Pixar Animation Studios, made for Walt Disney Pictures.
The tagline promises that “a single kindness can change everything.” The film mostly delivers on that, though it takes a long, uneven road to get there.
Trailer, via Pixar.
Arlo and the corn silo
Arlo is the runt of three children. His siblings, Libby and Buck, finish their hard tasks and press a mud-print onto the family’s corn silo — the mark that says they have grown up. Arlo cannot. His father, Poppa, voiced by Jeffrey Wright, tries to build his confidence by assigning him to guard the silo from thieving creatures.
The family’s critter trap catches a feral human child. Arlo cannot kill him and sets him loose. Poppa takes Arlo into a ravine to track the boy down. A thunderstorm forces them back. Poppa saves Arlo from a flash flood and is killed by debris.
That death is the hinge of the film, and it lands with real weight. Pixar has done this before, but the loss here is not a montage. It is a specific failure of nerve by a child who then has to live inside the consequence.
Downriver
Arlo spots the same caveboy robbing the silo. Blaming him for Poppa’s death, Arlo chases him into the river. Both are washed miles downstream. Arlo wakes far from home.
The caveboy ignores Arlo’s annoyance and keeps bringing him food. Arlo warms to him only after the boy saves him from a snake-like creature. That rescue draws the attention of Forrest Woodbush, an eccentric Styracosaurus voiced by Sohn himself, who decides he wants the boy for a pet.
Forrest forces Arlo into a contest to give the boy a name he will answer to. Arlo wins by calling him Spot. Jack Bright voices Spot.
A single kindness can change everything.
Where the movie stalls
The middle stretch is where The Good Dinosaur loses its footing. Arlo and Spot bond along the riverbank. One night Arlo laments his lost family, and Spot reveals that both of his parents are dead. It is the emotional center the film needs.
But the journey home is padded with encounters that do not build. Forrest Woodbush is a detour, not a step. The film keeps introducing characters who want something from Spot and then discarding them. The Western homage is present in the themes and character work, but it sits on the surface rather than shaping the story.
The result is a movie that knows what it is about and keeps forgetting to be about it.
The voice cast
The cast is stronger than the material. Frances McDormand plays Momma and Wright plays Poppa, and both bring a plain, grounded warmth to roles that could have been pure sentiment. Sam Elliott voices Butch, and his drawl does more character work than the script gives him. Anna Paquin and A.J. Buckley voice Ramsey and Nash. Steve Zahn voices Thunderclap. John Ratzenberger voices Earl. Marcus Scribner voices Buck. Maleah Nipay-Padilla voices Young Libby.
Ochoa carries the film as Arlo, and the performance is the reason the quieter scenes hold. Arlo is designed to look distinct and relatable, and the design does its job — he reads as small and unfinished next to the rest of his family.
Here is how the film’s two central relationships compare:
| Arlo and Poppa | Arlo and Spot | |
|---|---|---|
| Relationship | Father and son | Unlikely friends |
| Function in the story | Establishes Arlo’s fear and his guilt | Forces Arlo to act despite that fear |
| Key moment | Poppa dies saving Arlo from a flash flood | Spot saves Arlo from a snake-like creature |
| What it costs Arlo | His father | His suspicion of the boy he blamed |
| What it leads to | The journey downriver | The two traveling home together |
The table makes the film’s structure plain. The first relationship creates the wound. The second is supposed to heal it. The Good Dinosaur gets the wound right and rushes the healing.
What the production went through
Development began in 2009, when Peterson and Sohn started work on the film. Peterson came up with the idea of exploring what dinosaurs represent in the present day and how they are represented in stereotypes. The project was officially announced in 2011, with the release date, plot, director and co-director, producer and other details revealed at that time.
Production ran into problems. The team went through multiple story revisions, changed directors, and changed the voice cast. To build a realistic background, the team traveled to various American landscapes and later put them into the film.
That history shows on screen. The landscapes are the most confident thing in the movie — wide, specific, and unlike anything else in the Pixar catalog. The story is the part that got revised until it lost some of its spine. A film that changed directors and rebuilt its own plot more than once tends to carry the seams, and this one does.
What the film earns
The Good Dinosaur is a beautiful, sincere, structurally confused movie. It has a real idea — that kindness is a choice a frightened creature has to keep making — and it has the visuals to sell a world where that idea could breathe. What it does not have is a second act that earns its own ending.
The film’s best moments are its smallest: Arlo letting the trapped boy go, the mud-print he cannot make, the night he and Spot trade the truth about their dead parents. Those scenes are worth the ticket. The set pieces around them are not.
It is also, notably, the rare Pixar film where the ambition and the execution are visibly out of step. The alternate-history premise is a genuine hook, and the film does almost nothing with it after the opening. Dinosaurs who never went extinct and became farmers is a movie. The Good Dinosaur is only sometimes that movie.
Metacritic’s aggregate score for the film is 66 out of 100, or 6.6 of 10.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
