The Good Dinosaur

The Good Dinosaur    A conspiracy theory: A huge conglomerate is universally recognized for decades as the best maker of widgets worldwide. Then one day, it’s confronted with a much smaller business that, over the course of several years, proves that it is a better widget-maker still. The huge conglomerate buys the smaller business, but keeps them separate entities. And it puts the chief executive of the latter in charge of widget-making at both firms. Gradually the huge conglomerate’s widgets get better—which makes sense, because the man running widget-making is very good at his job. But at the same time, the widgets produced by the smaller business decline noticeably in quality. What’s going on? Is the chief widget-maker under pressure to devote more energy to the huge conglomerate’s widget-quality than to that of the smaller business? The Good Dinosaur is by no means a bad movie. But it breaks new ground for Pixar in that it’s the studio’s first feature that is explicitly—and pretty much exclusively—a kid’s movie. The story concerns a fearful, clumsy young apatosaurus named Arlo (voiced by Raymond Ochoa) who gets separated from his family and makes his way back home with the help of a feral caveboy whom he befriends. (Jack Bright snarls and howls wonderfully in the latter role.) Along the way, they encounter creatures both helpful and hostile, and they overcome a variety of obstacles.