Presumably that’s sequel material.) Apatosaurs use tools and agricultural concepts to farm corn in Utah or Colorado, while a redneck Tyrannosaurus Rex family herds longhorns through Monument Valley. (This timeline suggests there might, somewhere, be dino communities in the early stages of an industrial revolution. Opening millions of years in the past, the film posits a global “what if,” riffing on the idea that, had dinosaurs never been extinguished by an extinction-level event, the creatures might have stuck around as the planet’s dominant species set.Īfter an early shot that shows dinosaurs free of any anthropomorphized features, we end up in some alternate version of North America in which humans are at a rudimentary stage of development while dinosaurs are like homesteading human families in the 18th and 19th centuries. Even when its contradictions are jarring, the cumulative effect is memorable. “The Good Dinosaur” is more like a traditional work of Disney animation than any other film the digital studio has made. That dissonance, in turn, defines this latest Pixar effort, and also points to what is slightly different about this film.

The collision of elements - intensely lifelike scenic vistas explored by softly rounded, merchandise-friendly characters - creates a specific soft dissonance.

The good dinosaur pixar intro