The Good Dinosaur (Film Review)

A title can say lots, or little, about a film.

Is The Good Dinosaur a thought out title?  From a technical standpoint yes, considering the film is about a dinosaur and is an overall good Pixar feature.  Not great, not bad, not very good, not ehhh—just a passably enjoyable, would recommend seeing, good dinosaur-based film.  But is Good a good enough adjective to accurately describe the film and its protagonist Arlo (Raymond Ochoa)?  Could there not, in fact, be superior titles out there?  Why don’t we test some out and see if any fit better.

• The Animated Dinosaur: For Pixar’s expectedly gorgeous visuals.
• The Brave Dinosaur: For being the film’s true and only moral: to acknowledge your fears and face them.
• The Clichéd Dinosaur: For using the “kill off protagonist’s dad after teaching lesson” trope despite having been done-to-death in previous stories.
• The DreamWorks Dinosaur: For the film’s simple themes, crude humor and more traditional storyline.  Unusual for a Pixar film (even when regarding their weakest releases), and the type of story I’d expect more from an average DreamWorks’ film.
• The Emotionally Lacking Dinosaur: For its above-mentioned formulaic storytelling, which concludes with several predictable tropes.
• The Funny Dinosaur: For its surprisingly crude, yet really amusing jokes—such as when Arlo and Spot eat some bad berries and go through what can only be described as “Pixar’s first acid trip scene”.
• The Gory Dinosaur: For being the most brutal Pixar film made since The Incredibles.  Seriously, Spot the caveboy rips the head off a large beetle in graphic detail, a cute little Raccoon gets torn apart by vicious pterodactyls, and a T-Rex describes drowning a crocodile in his own blood!
• The Intense Dinosaur: For the film’s most effectively engaging scene—in which Arlo, to put it bluntly, grows a pair and faces his foes in an intense and violent exchange.
• The Overshadowed Dinosaur: For being outdone by its opening short, Sanjay’s Super Team, in addition to Pixar’s previous 2015 release Inside Out.
• The Pterodactyl “Dinosaur”: For being the second dinosaur film this year to portray pterosaurs in a violently villainous light.
• The Rip-off Dinosaur: For sharing a lot of similar plot points with previous animated films, such as The Lion King, Finding Nemo, and The Croods.
• The Superior Dinosaur: For being a far better dinosaur film than Jurassic World.
• The T-Rex Galloping Dinosaur: For the ridiculously hilarious way Arlo’s T-Rex companions travel: galloping with their arms steady as if riding horses (a clearly intentional design).
• The Unrealistic Dinosaur: For not living up to the absurdly high expectations created by Inside Out.
• The Violent-Villain Death Dinosaur: For its several gruesome death scenes, in particular the main antagonist's brutal demise.
• The Western Dinosaur: For the film’s Western-inspired themes and characters, including a T-Rex voiced by Sam Elliott (because every modern day Western apparently requires Sam Elliott).

In conclusion, most of these titles are pretty stupid.  The only one that honestly works better than Good is Brave, since it more accurately describes Arlo’s character development (plus he brutally kills the antagonist, which in my book doesn’t count as a “good” deed).  In terms of the overall film, however, Good is the ideal descriptor towards its quality.  The Good Dinosaur is a good film about a dinosaur, nothing more, nothing less.