Poor Arlo, our herbivore dinosaur hero, was given forelimbs that bend the wrong way, in the opposite direction from every other dinosaur and four-limbed vertebrate that has ever lived. There are plenty of paleontological nitpicks to be made about the movie.

Pixar basically bought itself another 66 million years of evolutionary history to play with and then it squandered the opportunity. The massive asteroid that sparked the great die-off missed, and so the reign of the nonavian dinosaurs continued unabated. The movie’s opening conceit is that the mass extinction of 66 million years ago never happened. All the plot points will be familiar to anyone who has watched The Lion King, Finding Nemo, Old Yeller, or White Fang, yet the familiar elements manage to come together well in this dinosaurian mashup of a well-worn yarn.īut there was one fundamental aspect of The Good Dinosaur that kept grating against the scientifically focused part of my brain. Despite the animated film’s immense budget and the sweeping vistas of Idaho, Wyoming, and Utah that serve as the backdrop for the alternate history tale, it’s really a small, simple story of “ a boy and his dog,” only this time the boy is a dinosaur and the dog is a boy. The Good Dinosaur is a weird little movie.

The good dinosaur pixar intro