With Inside Out, the animator Pixar got its mojo back. It was one of the year’s best films: passionate, sophisticated and beguiling. As for The Good Dinosaur … it has its critical admirers, but I found it desperately disappointing, unoriginal and twee, exactly the kind of creative cul-de-sac that we’d been afraid of before IO. The Good Dinosaur is premised on a what-if idea: the meteor supposed to wipe out the dinosaurs bypasses the planet, a near‑miss episode that makes a funny opening sequence. So dinosaurs stay on the scene with humans: we see a family of dinosaurs tending to their farm, and of course talking, though it’s not clear if this is an evolutionary development or the usual Disney anthropomorphisation. An apatosaurus called Arlo (voiced by Raymond Ochoa) endures a terrible catastrophe and against the odds makes a human friend. The story is unsubtly borrowed from The Lion King and The Jungle Book, with bits of Ice Age and The Croods. The Good Dinosaur looks great, of course, but it’s not in the league we’ve come to expect.
