The Good Dinosaur

Arlo and Spot's adventure to the Clawtooth Mountain.

To be honest, I have been looking forward this since the day I came to know about it. But it took so long to come out, even the Windows OS has upgraded thrice since then. After all these years, now I feel this is not what I wanted. It should have been different, especially the story. It was a fine animation, including all the technical aspect had no issues, but the story was not convincing.

Seemed just like another version of 'The Croods'. In fact, crossover between these two would be awesome like the boy from this and the family from other title as an original family who lost each other for some reason. But the trouble is, both are from the different production house and coming together is a tough task.

The civilised dinosaurs? That's kind of weird, but in a children's story and animation, all are fair. So I turned into one and enjoyed it. Apatosaurus are farmers, T-Rex are cowboys, yeah whole new perspective, apart from the humans who are still in lower on the chart of dominance and intelligent.

In my opinion, I'm being honest with what I felt. The theme about self discovery and to throw away fear is inspiring for the little children. At a same time, it is not a freshly developed story, kind of reminds 'The Lion King'. I know they're not same, but the initial parts are, between father and son. You can watch it once or twice, because it is not a boring film, but not the best.

7/10

Okay. I loved this up until the end. His height has been clearly defined.

Wilderness in this is incredible. I love that forest canyon. Wide sweeping shots. Fun characters and good conflicts. So much crazy tension built up to the scene where everything comes to a head. And it's dinosaurs running around bashing stuff up.

I once swam in a river down stream from a dam. Every moment I imagined I would die smashing into rocks and trees as a wall of water took me out.

I know I'm about fifty years too old for the demographic here, but I quite enjoyed this adventure. It's all fairly routine as timid young dinosaur "Arlo" gets accidentally washed downstream after an altercation with a tiny human whom he quickly names "Spot". Both of these characters want to find their way home but there are a flock of pterodactyls who have their eyes fixed on a small, bite-size, snack. Despite their initial reservations, the two realise that they have a better chance of survival if they work together and so off they set on a series of escapades trying to find their way back. It's not terribly original, no, but the two characters - especially the young lad, are quite engaging to watch as they demonstrate the benefits of inter-reliance, affection and all the usual messages typically conveyed in these sort of family animations. That said, it does manage to steer clear of too much cheesy sentiment for the most part and there's some fun in the dialogue as the menacing, though thankfully quite hapless, dactyls give them quite an hard time. The animation is grand scale and colourful - though maybe a bit on the two-dimensional side at times, and the story flows along effortlessly for ninety minutes that you'll probably never remember but it's a solid and light-hearted watch.