I’ll admit to going into Pixar’s new movie The Good Dinosaur with very low expectations so I’m surprised to say that I rather enjoyed the movie. It’s a really by-the-numbers animated film in theme and plot but it has a kind of perverse sense of weirdness that I respected… and yes the manipulative efforts to make the audience cry worked for me (not that I cried – this ain’t no Toy Story 3 but I would imagine some people might shed a few tears).

The biggest problem with the movie, besides the pedestrian plot you’ve seen before, is the art style of the characters. They are far too cartoony for the frankly amazing CG environment they are in. This frankly cheap looking character designs are one of the reason I thought this movie was going to be a dud. And, yet, these simple designs aren’t simplistic in detail… I admired little touches like the close-up textures of the characters or how the flesh at the base of the dinosaurs foot would flatten as it walked… that’s some unnecessary but very nice detail work.

Anyhow, the premise is that the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago missed and, over the course of a some millions of years, the dinos evolved into cartoon characters that will sell well at stores. They also developed agriculture and animal farming… and somehow built fences. Humans also evolves and the hero dino, who must learn courage, runs into a little boy who is five seconds away from being a total wild animal… they join up to find their way home.

And then it inexplicably turns into a western. Which I guess makes the farmers actually homesteaders. Ugh. This movie can be really weird (and includes a LSD drug trip out of nowhere and a hilarious bug decapitation which was somewhere between horrifying and hilarious) but I think that’s what kept me in it. The emotional manipulation moments worked but if that’s all the movie was, I’d have checked out.

So, yeah, I was impressed and surprised by this movie almost despite its by-the-numbers cobbled-together from a bunch of earlier Disney movie plots. It has heart, it’s cute, it’s funny, and its randomly weird as heck. I expected Pixar to blow it but they manged a charming flick (that might be a little scary for young ones).

Score: 83