Review:

The Good Dinosaur begins with an absolutely beautiful scene setting up their alternative version of Earth where the asteroid never hit and dinosaurs got to continue their reign at the top of the hierarchy. All of the nature shots and backgrounds are wonderfully animated and if you had told me they were from a Discovery Chanel nature documentary, I'd probably have believed you. They clearly spent a lot of time and money on these secondary elements, but everything else looks like garbage. The dinosaurs look terrible; like the very worst Illumination knock-off movies. For crying out loud, this is Pixar! How did these terrible character designs and animations pass all the way to theaters? All of the characters look awful: dinosaurs, people, bugs, everything that isn't scenery. It's damn near painful to see the beautiful water effects and physics share the same screen with Arlo looking like a Duplo Block. The animation that should have gotten all the attention looks like crap. The voice acting is okay, but no one does a particularly good job. Although not as bad as the animation, the story is also dreadful. There are so many awful plot conveniences and plot holes, terrible pacing, awful characters, and the most cliche and predictable story imaginable. There are tons of little dumb things that bothered me, like how since the asteroid didn't hit, dinosaurs kept on evolving for millions of years, but they didn't physically change in any way, but instead are somehow now capable of building houses and farming. How the Hell is an Apatosaurus with no thumbs or any gripping ability able to construct, put on, and operate a wooden mechanism to spread seed and how come they have a tool for that, but they are still digging trenches with their heads? Why do the humans (if that's what they are supposed to be) act like canines and not primates? Just because dinosaurs still exist, humans are millions of years behind on their evolutionary track? The Apatosaurus literally only farm corn and don't interact with any other characters, so are we to believe that they survive by only eating corn? There are tons of stupid little things like this that just piss me off, but not nearly as much as the lame, cookie-cutter story that you can predict beat by beat five minutes in. The inauthentic, saccharine moments are so forced, manipulative, and nauseating that I really wanted to turn the movie off. I hated every character and the stupid decisions they made and I hate Disney/Pixar for letting this horse crap make it past story boards. This is easily the worst Pixar movie. Even if we include the awful early Pixar shorts, this is the worst. I was prepared for something super mediocre, but The Good Dinosaur (why is that even the name of the movie?) is abysmal. Just take out all of the characters and sell it as a 90 minute screen saver, because the only thing here that isn't garbage is the backgrounds.