‘The Good Dinosaur’ and Pixar’s Extinction

Pixar are renowned for having churned out hit after hit since their 1995 feature film debut, Toy Story. Sadly, their winning streak ended after the release of Toy Story 3 in 2010, whose perfect conclusion also acts as a delineation of the end of an era. The travesty that is Cars 2 (2011) then ushered in a new era of mediocrity – a realm as of then untouched and alien to the Pixar universe. Even their weakest of their original batch of films, Cars (2006), maintained an interesting, complex and engaging storyline. Suspiciously, the company’s downfall seems to have occurred ever since Disney’s acquisition of the company around this time, with Ratatouille (2007), Wall-E (2008) and Up (2009) representing the very peak of the company’s innovation and masterful storytelling. This year, despite the promise of a welcome return to form with the (perhaps somewhat overly convoluted) Inside Out (2015), their subsequent release, Peter Sohn’s The Good Dinosaur (2015), looks set to become Pixar’s first ever box office flop.

There’s scepticism over precisely why this is. Some publications currently appear to argue that the blame might lie with the feature’s problematic direction, since the original director Bob Peterson was forced to step down, unable to amend story problems in the third act. Others question whether the film’s delayed release date played a part in its failure to gain significant attention. Really, however, there’s no explanation other than the sad reality that audiences are wising up to the fact that the average Pixar film is no longer as great as it used to be.

It seems Peterson’s The Good Dinosaur was a somewhat different beast. For one thing, his original concept saw the coming together of a number of dinosaur species, forming something akin to an Amish agrarian lifestyle. This still sounds a peculiar idea, but it would nonetheless have made for a film more visually appealing. After all, Pixar films are usually littered with well-developed, interesting and funny side characters, and such an ensemble appears to be lacking in their latest release, which maintains a rather isolated and lonely concentration on its protagonist, Arlo. Peterson’s version, too, sounds more focussed – cave-boy Spot was initially given his name based on his dressing as a bug and adorning his forehead with decorative spots. The way Spot was given his name in the finished product (by merely responding to the name ‘Spot’ out of the blue) is, by comparison, rather lazy and illogical. Yet even if these changes had not occurred, I can’t imagine The Good Dinosaur having fared much better at the box office.

The reason for this is that it is the story that prevents The Good Dinosaur from being a Pixar classic. It’s essentially a poor man’s The Lion King (1994), channelling an unsettlingly similar ‘journey home’ narrative, minus the attribution of guilt that repels the main character from his return. Like Brave (2012), the story is weak and predictable, and, though not quite as feeble, it certainly ranks as one of Pixar’s most vapid. It’s mildly entertaining, yes, but that’s about it. Conceptually, it falls at the first hurdle, as its opening scenes require the audience to suspend their collective disbelief beyond its usual parameters; forcing your audience to conceive dinosaurs as rustic, agrarian folk is as awkward as it is ludicrous. Ultimately, it seems underworked and it shows, even in trailers, movie posters and previews. Consequently, due to its lack of appeal, The Good Dinosaur went extinct long before its release.

Read my review of The Good Dinosaur here

Sources:

Digital Spy: http://www.digitalspy.com/movies/news/a776642/could-the-good-dinosaur-be-pixars-first-flop-by-pixar-standards-at-any-rate/

Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-hill/by-thinning-the-good-dino_b_8738842.html

The Verge: http://www.theverge.com/2015/12/7/9868122/the-good-dinosaur-pixar-box-office-failure

Image Sources:

YouTube: The Good Dinosaur Official US Trailer 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daFnEiLEx70. Accessed 09/12/2015.