The year 2015 was fortunate enough to see the release of not one, but two original films from the masterminds at Pixar: Inside Out and The Good Dinosaur. In the summer, Inside Out was met with rapturous praise and adoration as it was quickly hailed as a crowning achievement for the studio (currently 98% on Rotten Tomatoes). Not only did the emotions inside Riley's head captivate the critics; it also took the box office by storm, going up against the recording shattering Jurassic World while holding its own on its way to bringing in $850 million worldwide. By all accounts, Inside Out is a massive success.
Fast forward to November and audiences beheld the second film from the studio in 2015, The Good Dinosaur. While Arlo and company certainly garnered its fair share of supporters, the acclaim was much more subdued. Currently boasting a still strong 77% on Rotten Tomatoes, the general consensus from critics and audiences alike was that The Good Dinosaur was a middle of the pack effort by Pixar at best. The box office supports this claim as it is now being reported that Pixar may bring in its smallest receipt since A Bug's Life in 1998.
Personally, in regard to Inside Out, I consider it to be not only one of Pixar's finest films, but also one of the finest films in modern history period, animated or live action. Its brilliance is unrivaled and the story is refreshingly original from beginning to end. With The Good Dinosaur, while I did agree to an extent with the consensus that it ranks somewhere in the middle between the Pixar classics like Toy Story and Wall-E and the disaster known as Cars 2, I also left the theater wondering if The Good Dinosaur truly deserves that ranking or was it just a case of terrible timing for Pixar and the film. Could Pixar have benefited from waiting a few more months to release this film? What did the original idea for the film that was supposed to have been released in 2014 look like? Or was this Pixar meteor just doomed to miss the mark entirely? Essentially, what went wrong with The Good Dinosaur?
In order to fully get a grasp on this predicament, we must first trace the roots of The Good Dinosaur. Pixar had been working on this film for quite some time, and they had originally slated it to be released in 2014, ensuring that it would be released alone in 2014 and Inside Out would have 2015 all to itself. However, due to a directing change halfway through production due to creative differences between the studio and the director, Pixar decided they needed more time and pushed the release back to fall 2015 while the story received a complete remake. This was an unprecedented move for Pixar as they had never released two films in the same calendar year. They also left 2014 vacant, marking only the third year since 2001 that came and went without a Pixar release.
When the summer rolled in, Inside Out received the aforementioned praise. Anytime the words "masterpiece" or "instant classic" start being widely proclaimed and then accepted, you know you have something special on your hands. So when it was time for The Good Dinosaur, an unfortunate inevitability occurred within critic circles and audiences alike:
We wrongfully compared The Good Dinosaur exclusively to Inside Out without even knowing it.
We do this all the time throughout a year, which is why you see so many "Top 10 Movies of ____" lists every year (side note: I'll be releasing one of those in about a month or so). We compare movies like Ant-Man to Spotlight or The Martian to Brooklyn. Unfair as it may be, that's the nature of the beast when it comes to ranking movies. Unfortunately, Pixar cannot escape this fact either. It seems like every time a new Pixar film comes out, everyone feels the need to share with the world their rankings on where all the Pixar movies stands. I am not at all pointing fingers here, though, considering I released a list like that of my own just about a month ago from the time of this writing. Therefore, whether we consciously knew it or not, walking into the theater to see The Good Dinosaur, we were comparing it to Pixar's most recent effort prevalent on our minds, Inside Out.
Think about it this way. As I write this post, we are currently one week away from the highly anticipated release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. As I gather with my fellow nerds at the Thursday night showing, it will be natural for all of us to compare episode seven to the original trilogy featuring Luke, Han, and Leia. They are all four totally different films, but we like to rank our movies, so we will all eventually conclude that episode seven was superior or inferior to one of the original three. That's what went down in theaters across the country as people began witnessing the journey of Arlo and Spot. Due to the fact that Inside Out was so well-received, The Good Dinosaur had to live up to those standards or it would have been deemed a failure by being simply mediocre. That'll also be the case with The Force Awakens. If comparisons to the prequel trilogy start showing up, failure has occurred for Lucasfilm because the lofty standard is the original trilogy.
To me, when looking at the overall reception and box office figures for The Good Dinosaur, it seems as if people are punishing Pixar for making a film that is just really good as opposed to being classical. Pixar has and will always continue to raise the bar in the animation business, a feat they accomplished mightily with Inside Out. However, with The Good Dinosaur, because the film did meet that bar, a disappointing narrative was written. In my opinion, I believe that The Good Dinosaur is an extremely well done piece of film-making by Pixar. In fact, I would even wager that if any other studio in the animation industry not named Pixar had made it, the reception would be quite different because it would have been hailed as a phenomenal film.
Now, I am not calling on everyone to change their opinion of The Good Dinosaur and take it easy on Pixar. That's what makes movies so awesome in that civil conversations can be had even when expressing an opinion. What I am advocating for is a repeat viewing whenever The Good Dinosaur is released on Blu-Ray. Allow for time to pass between Inside Out and The Good Dinosaur first and foremost. Then, when you insert the disk into your Blu-Ray player, don't compare this unique film to an entirely different unique film. Basically, let Inside Out be Inside Out and let The Good Dinosaur be The Good Dinosaur. I know that people will still feel as if Pixar created just a good film instead of a great one, but I've also got a feeling that people might just warm up to Arlo and Spot withtime. Nothing could have followed Inside Out, so rather than comparing The Good Dinosaur to it, let's allow each story to inspire and entertain us at their own level. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion; all I'm asking is for you to not allow for your opinion to be set in stone after just one viewing. Let your opinion evolve. Who knows, you may just have a new favorite Pixar movie one day.
-Cody Fleenor
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