Critics reviews

For discerning parents and grandparents, I recommend The Good Dinosaur, which, despite its title, offers a strong dose of realism, an encounter with death, fear, and violence, coupled with amazing feats of animation and a very smart story that links it to the worthy tradition that runs from Winsor McCay to Steven Spielberg.

When Pixar's Inside Out was released in 2015, it felt unique; many of its ideas had appeared before but rarely melded so well. Pixar's latest offering, The Good Dinosaur, feels inescapably like 'another animated film', despite its handsome presentation and charm... A below average Pixar but an above-average cartoon, Good Dinosaur feels specifically targeted at children.

What we find in The Good Dinosaur is a plainspoken, earnestly told tale of family, featuring a guileless young hero and his trusty pet and companion. This is mostly a good thing: if there's one complaint that could be lobbed at Pixar, it's that its tricks are by now too machine-tooled, too expected. In comparison to its hipper brethren, The Good Dinosaur feels like a breath of fresh air.

There are some nice inventive sequences and some interesting ideas about evolutionary paths never traveled (four-legged serpents, giant insects). But altogether, The Good Dinosaur feels like a patchy suite of numbers, rather than an organic film. With its prehistoric comic invention, the heads-down slapstick of the Ice Age series is a lot more fun... What I can commend is those heightened touches of abstract beauty that emerge from the film's evocation of nature

As rendered by Pixar's computer processors and server banks, the digital landscapes are meant to be breathtakingly beautiful, but they tend to come across more like very expensive screensavers or immersive desktop wallpapers. The idea of being at all awed by a computerized, counterfeit image of the white sun breaking over a snow-capped mountaintop is a superlative example of what writer Jean Baudrillard called the "naturalistic simulacra": the cheery re-creation of nature, in God's image.

The resulting film is amiable, pretty, and charming in all the right ways — even if it ultimately settles for a fairly typical tale of a late bloomer finding his way.

The Good Dinosaur is the sort of bland holiday time-killer that exhausted parents might describe as "cute" as a way of evading their indifference to it. Children might not settle for it either, and one shouldn't encourage them to.

By the time Sam Elliott shows up as a longhorn-herding, curiously masochistic T-Rex named Butch, the film has shifted firmly into John Ford country. What Pixar have served up here, then, is a prehistoric psychedelic western filled with the kind of offbeat larks you don't expect to find in a contemporary kids' movie.

The Good Dinosaur" has a few things on its mind, but its tone is overwhelmingly playful, not hectoring. Like most children's movies it offers a lesson or two, mostly about being true to yourself (and the equally helpful message to always follow the river), but what lingers is the beautiful animation that's by turns painterly and borderline photorealist and, in itself, an ode to the natural world.

Since the release of Toy Story 20 years ago, it's become clear that Pixar are the Django Reinhardts of strumming heartstrings. But it feels like we need a new word to describe the very particular blend of emotions that The Good Dinosaur stirs up... It makes you wince at the fragility of life while simultaneously welling up at the wonder of it – and that unexpected mixing of the sentimental and the existential left me feeling what can only be described as aww-struck.

Serving up a sweet tale of interspecies friendship and a stunning prehistoric vision of the American Northwest, "The Good Dinosaur" is easily one of the great landscape films of 2015, even if what unfolds against that landscape isn't always as captivatingly rendered.