The Good Dinosaur

The Good Dinosaur arrives as a curious artifact of Pixar's 2015 output, a film so thoroughly committed to the aesthetics of a nature documentary that it forgets to include any recognizable human society whatsoever. The narrative trajectory, which concerns an anxious dinosaur learning courage through his bond with a feral human child, operates entirely in a primal register where such contemporary concerns as representation or systemic critique have no purchase. The film presents Spot as a wordless companion, a creature more pet than person, which conveniently sidesteps any meaningful engagement with the question of what it might mean to depict human characters at all.

Where the film does present human figures, they are depicted as frontier archetypes drawn from a distinctly pre-civil-rights understanding of the American West. The human farmers and ranchers who populate the narrative are rendered with a kind of nostalgic reverence that suggests Pixar was more interested in landscape painting than social observation. The voice cast, which includes several actors of color, lends its talents to dinosaur characters rather than human ones, a casting choice that speaks volumes about the film's priorities. There is no particular effort to interrogate the settler colonial mythology being invoked, nor any suggestion that such interrogation was desired.

The film's central relationship, between Arlo and Spot, functions as a straightforward buddy narrative without ironic distance or social commentary. We are meant to find their friendship moving because it transcends species difference, not because it models any particular vision of how humans ought to coexist. In this sense, The Good Dinosaur represents a kind of cultural innocence, or perhaps strategic amnesia. It is a film that exists in its own world, asking only that we admire its rendering of storm clouds and river valleys. For those seeking evidence of contemporary cultural awareness in a children's animated feature, one must look elsewhere.