Hacker Cinema
The Good Dinosaur
2015 · Film · 93 min
Directed by Peter Sohn
An epic journey into the world of dinosaurs where an Apatosaurus named Arlo makes an unlikely human friend.
3 positive11 negative2 mixed5 neutralfrom 21 commenters
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24 comments on Hacker News
There aren't many real geniuses out there now, but he is one of them. The Good Dinosaur is still one of Pixar's most gorgeous looking movies to this day.
I wholeheartedly disagree. Pixar does not have a monopoly on attention to detail. They're flush with cash and their leadership has decent taste.
There are so many creators putting in intense work, and doing it on low budgets. You can't claim these folks don't have attention to detail. Check out A24, low and mid and low budget films, or independent films and you'll see a wide assortment of highly meticulous storytellers.
Pixar, on the other hand, isn't low or mid budget:
Toy Story - $30 Million A Bug’s Life - $120 Million Toy Story 2 - $90 Million Monsters, Inc. - $115 Million Finding Nemo - $94 Million The Incredibles - $92 Million Cars - $120 Million Ratatouille - $150 Million WALL-E - $180 Million Up - $175 Million Toy Story 3 - $200 Million Cars 2 - $200 Million Brave - $185 Million Monsters University - $200 Million Inside Out - $175 Million The Good Dinosaur - $200 Million Finding Dory - $200 Million Cars 3 - $175 Million Coco - $175 Million Incredibles 2 - $200 Million Toy Story 4 - $200 Million Onward - $175 Million Soul - $150 Million Luca - Unknown but probably around $150 Million Turning Red - $175 Million Lightyear - $200 Million For that amount of money, they had better pay attention to detail.
Miyazaki is doing way more with much less.
Voices of a Distant Star was one person -- Shinkai. That's the kind of thing we'll see more and more of. Small creators reaching audiences and building studios. Gooseworx, psychicpebbles, Vivienne Medrano. That's the algorithm of tomorrow.
AI, as a tool, makes this more possible. One of the first people to do it successfully was Joel Haver, and he's just the first of many to come.
The movies visible in the photos in the article, and their runtimes in minutes, are:
94 The Good Dinosaur 92 Trolls 98 Wall-E 88 The Lion King 103 Moana 81 Toy Story 91 Trolls World Tour 95 Inside Out 103 Frozen II 95 A Bug's Life > We have two boys, and the eldest is permitted a 30-minute TV session in the morning and another in the evening.
So...if one of them wants to watch The Lion King or Toy Story they have to split it over at least 3 viewing sessions split over at least 2 days? And for anything else on that list they need to split it over at least 4 viewing sessions?
That seems overly restrictive. Yes, limiting kid's TV time is probably a good idea, but would it really hurt to have some flexibility so that they can finish a movie in one session? Maybe let them bank sessions, so they can say skip morning TV for 3 days, and apply that time to the 4th day's evening to get a slot for a whole movie.
I think generally people consider a movie to be a hit if it 1. is profitable (they immediately talk about a sequel) and 2. if it does better than expected.
The second part is the problem - if Pixar releases a movie that is good, more than recoups costs, and otherwise is a fine addition to Dreamworks lineup, it could still be considered a complete flop by most everyone.
E.g., "The Good Dinosaur" which (apparently) eventually made enough that it was "worthwhile" - didn't break any records and didn't really make money, so it's a flop (Onward even more so).
It's complicated even more by a movie being able to be a flop, cult classic, and widely loved at the same time.
> Now it’s just more Disney nonsense, the soul has been lost.
Did you see any of them? Soul is probably their best movie; Luca and Turning Red were great. Onward was surprisingly good. Elemental was a new genre for them, and while it wasn’t perfect, it was still really good.
I didn’t see Lightyear, but this is also the Pixar that did Cars 2 and The Good Dinosaur, so it’s not like every movie knocked it out of the park.
At some point in the 2000s Pixar shifted from making movies for everyone to making movies for certain demographics, or people with certain issues in their life. Moving, strained relationship with parent, a purpose in life etc. Not every movie resonates with everyone, but almost every movie has its defenders. Maybe Brave doesn’t work for you if you and your mom don’t have trouble. Maybe Soul doesn’t work for you if aren’t a bit down.
They are also perfectly ok making simpler movies like Luca, that aren’t trying to be some sort of epic treaties.
What Freddie is getting wrong here is projecting his ranking onto everyone else, even when he is calling out the critics as being the wrong audience for the movies. A lot of the movies aren’t made for critics, but because the director or storyteller has something really personal to say to a subset of society.
Cars 2 and The Good Dinosaur (which I’m not sure I’ve even ever finished) are their only real true misfires. A lot of their whelming movies (Onward, Lightyear) feel that way because they feel like a waste of premise and opportunity more than actually bringing bad.
There are plenty of series and movies that use more-contemporary cultural values to mask bad-storytelling. I really don't see how Pixar is at fault for this, however. How is this relevant to the failures of The Good Dinosaur and Elemental, for example?
There have only been a few Pixar movies I haven’t liked Cars 2, The Good Dinosaur and Finding Dory and not all of the others have had drawn an emotional response from me. That said anything that draws you in and makes you feel something is by definition good art. Art is completely subjective. This blog post is just another “I don’t like other people having fun” post
So many thinkpieces have come out about Pixar and... I disagree with all of them. Pixar has put out a lot of masterpieces. They've put out a lot of movies that, while not masterpieces, are still really great. They've put out a few mediocre movies, and they've put out one or two real stinkers (Cars 2, The Good Dinosaur).
They can put out some mediocre movies, or some merely very good movies, without having lost their way. Look at their release schedule! 2 movies a year some years! You can't release movies that quickly and have every one be a masterpiece. And that's okay.
This isn't Pixar's first bad or mediocre movie—Cars 2 was straight up bad, and Monsters University and The Good Dinosaur were both mediocre. Coming up after the release of some really solid titles, I'm not too worried.
> You can look at all the Disney movies for kids: all men are stupid, liars, stealer, and when you hit them it’s funny. On the opposite the feminine is often perfect, manage it all on the first try.
A few counterexamples: Tangled, Wreck-It Ralph, Zootopia, Raya and the Last Dragon, Toy Story, Monsters Inc, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Ratatoullie, Up, The Good Dinosaur, Onward, Soul, and Luca.
Yes I will say my daughter absolutely loves Encanto (and also Moana). Also the Good Dinosaur (but we had to cut back on that because she started growling like the feral child in the movie and that seemed like a bad development!). The music in Encanto is good.
I'd argue the only real misses were the cash grab sequels (Cars 2, Cars 3, and I can only assume Lightyear is in that group but looking at RT it seems like both ratings are still "fresh"). The rest of the movies on the post-acquisition list were good, if not great. Critically, I think the worst one on the list is the Good Dinosaur and even that's still generally well liked.
Inside out was good, but not great, IMO.
Counter-counterpoints:
Cars 2, Brave, Monsters University, The Good Dinosaur, Finding Dory, Cars 3, Coco, Onward, Luca, Turning Red, Lightyear.
The (not very original) point is: You can no longer count on a Pixar movie being excellent.
> Coming soon: Chris Pratt using a team of sauropods to farm in the next Jurassic Park movie.
The Good Dinosaur (2015) - Argo and his family worked the farm like champs. No “T wrecks” there!
Modern Disney filmmaking (Pixar, WDAS) is much closer to the Miyazaki approach you describe than you'd think. It's very, very iterative; each film goes through 5-6 screenings, during which the story structure can and does change dramatically. People are very definitely working on the final product while the story is still being worked out. One pretty common pattern: with 8-9 months left to go until release, the entire third act has to be scrapped and reworked, and often big chunks of the first and second act reworked to match. Voice actors for the main characters are involved throughout, and often come in many times to record new pages of freshly written dialog.
If all this seems chaotic, it is. It leads to untold stress as the release date looms closer and closer and the ending still isn't figured out, which compresses the schedule for each department to deliver a finished product. Very very rarely, the release date is allowed to slip (see "The Good Dinosaur" for example) but that's really the nuclear option, as it involves shuffling the release schedule and incurs a ton of cost. This is a big part of why these movies cost so much: compressing the schedule means hiring tons of people and paying them tons of overtime.
Source: I worked the better part of a decade at WDAS.
I don't think The Good Dinosaur was a very good "children's movie" in the typical sense, but I'd recommend taking a second look at it if you haven't recently. I watched it again after seeing it when it first came out, and I found it to be a pretty good movie - even if it doesn't fit the typical kids movie mold.
It's ironic because The Good Dinosaur would be a good example of them taking a bet on a somewhat unique vision (a dinosaur spaghetti western?) with a more mature outlook, and then getting shit on by reviewers because it wasn't as funny or charming as Inside Out.
Maybe. It’s not really comparable to such a specific studio like Pixar though. There’s plenty of talk before that talent likes Netflix. And not just because of the money being given out either. The culture of financiers is going to matter in some capacity. No other company is doing or has done what Netflix is doing either. Netflix is spending the most alongside Disney. But Netflix was already branching off with their original content years ago when their budget was at least not as enormous as it is now. Like all their foreign language originals.
Pixar is amazing. But it isn’t without warts either. The Cars franchise and releasing two movies in one year with The Good Dinosaur bombing as a result.
That only works if the films are still good though. Pixar has had a couple of bombs, The Good Dinosaur for one.
Good Dinosaur and Up are both interesting cases of Pixar's environment team exploring if they could use Google Earth (and equivalents) for location scouting, to the point where Good Dinosaur used a lot of direct satellite imagery and terrain data to bootstrap the animation process. Which is fascinating technically, but absolutely an interesting comparison to the less realistic approaches of everything else in the film. Up they managed it quite well because the real place they found as example is fantastic enough to support the rest of the film and the pulp adventure storyline supported that uncanny valley realism; The Good Dinosaur did not find something fantastic enough nor did it really support the story near as well.
Pixar really wants to stay out of the uncanny valley with their characters, so they intentionally design them to look "cartoony"--closer to the classic hand-drawn animation of the past. They want their movies to look like animated movies.
"Live action" movies try to make it to the other side of the uncanny valley. Usually the most successful efforts cheat a bit by avoiding human characters. Think Avatar, Gollum, Snoke, Thanoes, etc. They look so real! (If aliens or ring-wracked wretches were real...)
Where movies looks weird is when there are elements on both sides of the uncanny valley--in the case of The Good Dinosaur, the backgrounds look real and the characters look like cartoons.
This was surprising because Pixar is usually careful to avoid this. The sea in Finding Nemo looked amazing, but it didn't really look 100% real--it looked like a beautiful stylized version of a sea. Same with the environments in The Incredibles, as the top blog here details.
Cars is not a bad movie, it did very well, it was just a little below normal Pixar quality but still above most other studios work.
The good dinosaur, Brave and Monsters university all still good but not quite Pixar.
Cars two is an absolute disaster though and it's a shame it wasn't covered in the book. Something clearly went very wrong with this movie and they redid most of it in ten weeks or so I read, it seems to go against all the values and things they talk about and it does feel as if the story they tell about themselves is perhaps worked as much as the stories they make.
The selection on Netflix started out bad years ago and declined from there. I've started using VidAngel for almost all of my movie streaming lately. They've got a great selection of movies/shows including new releases (e.g., The Martian, The Big Short, The Good Dinosaur, etc.) that I can stream for $1 (or keep if I prefer). The filtering is a nice bonus (no more JarJar Binks). They even have a "Not on Netflix" section.
I realize that the above sounds like an advertisement. It's not meant to, I truly use it daily.
http://www.vidangel.com (naked link) or https://www.vidangel.com?vip=c5smk9fr71 (referral link)
Very interesting, never heard of this before. More background at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Dinosaurs:_An_Alternative_Evolution
I suppose this has something to do with the new Pixar movie? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Dinosaur
Also reminds me of Dinotopia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinotopia