OT The Good Dinosaur
Oso3D
Posts: 14,908
in The Commons
Watching this Pixar movie for the first time... the CGI is so amazingly good I'm almost in tears.
I mean, it's BEAUTIFUL.
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It was considered a flop at the box office. I haven't seen it but when I saw the commercials I was so impressed!
I... I'm astonished that it didn't do well. It's a decent story, there's a great stylistic element, there are some clever world designy things, and, again, the visuals are just... stunning.
Even if you hate every moment of the story, I highly recommend everyone here to go watch it just to look at the astonishing CGI.
Yeah, the graphics are really amazing! Not my type of movie though.....I'm more into the disney princess thing : ) Merida is my favorite from Pixar, I also like the incredibles : )
Cannot wait for Moana!
Haven't seen anything but a trailer but I thought there was a style clash in the models. I will buy the DVD/BR though.
I usually end up going to 3D cartoon movies because of the 3D (and rarely go to any 2D movies anymore) but each time I had the itch to go see "The Good Dinosaur" in 3D while it was playing locally, I changed my mind. I just don't like movies (cartoon or not) where people are around dinosaurs. It's hard enough to teach kids the difference between reality and fantasy. I bet if you take a poll on the street of people in a modern city there are way too many who would believe that people co-existed with dinosaurs. Of course you could say the same thing about vampires, zombies, and werewolves (and Loch Ness monsters and Sasquach, etc.) but at least we know real facts about dinosaurs, and still we promote the idea that the 64 million years between them and us didn't exist. PASFS!
I noticed that "The Good Dinosaur" is available as a PPV (Pay Per View) movie on DishTV this month and since people are raving about the graphics I might overcome my aversion and watch it for the sake of the art. Or I might save my $5.99 and wait until it comes to the free TV and I'll just DVR past the 25% commercials during its showing. And since it was a theater flop, it will show up on free TV relatively soon.
Haven't seen it, but I wonder how they explain the scientific error of having humans and dinosaurs on the earth at the same time, with they were separted by millions of years?
It would be interesting to watch with the sound off just to appreciate the visuals.
One of the promos implied that this takes place in an alternate universe where the dino-killer asteroid never hit, and that was a moderately big deal in the written promotional materials leading up to release, so I don't see why people would get their noses out of joint about the dinos & hominids plot angle.
The reason i didn't see it at the theater is because most of the characters seemed super annoying in the promos, and the only halfway interesting ones-a family of cattle-herding T-rexes headed by Sam Elliott fighting off cattle rustling raptors-were a minor episode in the main character's journey.
I watched the trailer. I'm not digging the realistic environment with the playdoh looking characters.
I couldn't get over the stylistic gulf between the characters and settings. I found it really jarring
Somewhere along the way I became way more of a Dreamworks fan. If you havn't seen it The Croods has some of the best visual design ever IMO, and I liked that the most developed relationship was father and daughter (Folks talk about how great it is that the most important relationship in Frozen is sisters, except they don't actually interact for 80% of the movie).
For Disney, at least Moana doesnt look like a stick with eyes the way the frozen girls did.
In case anyone can't tell I kind of hate frozen.
IMO, it works better than the trailers suggest.
There are some interesting touches with the figures. Like, when the main character steps, you can SEE his column-shaped feet squish and flex. The skin has a lot of quality to it. It IS kind of odd how weird the characters look, and I can't claim everyone will feel similarly, but... it didn't bug me much.
J Cade: Heh. While, on my part, I found Croods UTTERLY jarring and confusing, both in world design and characters that just sort of wandered all over the place. There were a lot of touches I found endearing, I enjoyed Guy, and the bizarro world was kind of interesting, but I kept going 'is this supposed to be anything in history? Is this post apocalypse? wtf?'
And I adored Frozen.
All types!
Yep its totally one of those personal taste things. I'm also one of those people who gets stuck on small things and can't let them go. I have difficulty with game of thrones because their aren't enough farms; Somewhere in the back of my head theres a voice just going 'they should have all starved to death by now' on repeat.
But pixars characters do have great movement (the squishing and flexing) they're the best at having characters not look stiff
Croods visuals I just found fun.
I thought the world was at least internally consistant enough to work
Truth be told if I were 50 years younger I would have been hot for Guy.
Well, even 30 years younger.
Even 15. 
But now he'd have to be blindfolded.
But "Frozen" left me cold.
Frozen, Wreck-It Ralph, and Tangled all suffer from the same problems for me in that I like the main characters (Anna, Elsa, Ralph, Rapunzel) and at least some of the supporting cast and "get" what the filmmakers are trying to do, but I can't hardly focus on what's going on over the sound of the plot wheels grinding into position-not that the more traditional Disney films didn't suffer from that as well, but there's a dreamlike, idealized quality to the Disney Renaissance films and the older films that they harken back to, that encourages you to roll with it, in a way that the new Disney films, with their attitude of "we are going to make you look at love and friendship in an all-new hipper, healthier, totally modern light!", are not equipped to do.
Also, I'm not that high on Flynn/Eugene, Kristoff, and I outright hate Penelope and the Frozen trolls, so those were definitely demerits in my book. I thought Big Hero 6 worked the best of the recent Disney animated films in terms of the plot not feeling completely contrived, but some of that may be the gonzo setting.
Croods...ugh, saw the trailer and ran like hell. Not saying it's bad, just not my thing. I like a fair amount of Dreamworks Animation (first Shrek and Dragon movies, the Kung Fu Panda films), but usually I'm trying to ignore their protagonist in favor of the supporting cast.
ETA: my favorite computer-animated film of recent years is Inside Out, which I was not expecting to like at all. Favorite production design for a recent computer animated film would be Planet 51 though-that mashup of 1950s suburbia, 1950s futurism, and wacky alien stuff is amazingly charming. I stop whenever I surf across that movie on tv, even though the whiny teenaged alien protagonist needs a sharp kick in the butt.
They "play-doh" figures are a side effect of using Maya. Once you've used Maya enough, you understand why.
Kendall
Inside Out is also a great demonstration of the use of musical theme to draw a movie together. Now, EVERY time I hear that musical interlude I choke up.
(Mind you, I'm a very sentimental person, and that movie also had the power of somewhat mimicing family life -- we moved to near San Francisco from Washington, where my kids have spent their first 6 years literally one month before the movie came out.)
That bothers me too. The set and the characters look like they were designed by two very different teams of artists with very different ideas. From the trailer it looks OK otherwise, but I can't get past that character design.
Otherwise it was promoted like just another feel good, plop the kids in front of the screen movie. It may be something beyond that, but that was the vibe I picked up. I got the same from the Croods, and when I eventually watched it I was pleasently surprised, so who knows.
Regarding dinosaurs and humans - I used to get uppity about that too. I didn't get my degree in it but I have a background in paleontology, and it took me a while to get this but; these are disney movies, fairy tales, not science class. Sure, it can confuse a kid to see dinosaurs and people together, just as it does when cats are presented as evil and mice good, wolves that eat anthropomorphic pigs and little old ladies that grant wishes (who aren't Hillary).
Not to be too preachy about that, but its just fairy tale fun. Alongside those movies and stories and Fred Flinstone cartoons, teach them about the real world. And not those condiscending pap science shows on PBS aimed at kids. Those I think are worse than purple smilodons and pterodactyles that play records.
Yeah, I've done the "relocating due to parents work as a kid" thing myself, so I could definitely identify with that part of Inside Out.
I like the trailer that I've seen for the Blender short film called 'Alike'. I am really liking the style of the characters and the environment in the trailer. The way they did things has been done, eg Pleasantville, but it's kind of minimal and indicative of how human attention spans work.
Good Dinosaur is a nice film, a good coming of age story, amazing animation as befits Pixar, but it's jut that.. a nice film. From NOT-Pixar, it would be top notch, but from Pixar, it's just kind of there. (Coming out the same year as Inside Out didn't help, as that has the stellar story). It is definitly worth a watch.
Now, the best 3d film of the year was The Peanuts Movie, which of course got overshadowed and ignored! Putting aside the wonderful story and voice work, the animation is amazing, capturing the look of Schultz drawing in 3d and totaly working.
Yeah, "Inside Out" was a fresh, well done, funny movie that almost everybody could relate to. Loved it!
"The Peanuts Movie" not so much. I guess if one is new to the Peanuts gang they could be entertaining. Personally, I thought that the Peanuts characters were tired 50 years ago.
I watched the good dinosaur yesterday all the way through then again about halfway through. I will try to watch the rest tonight. I bought the digital copy yesterday instead of renting it. At first I thought the style of the dinosaurs would be annoying but once I got into the movie it was okay. In some ways it reminds me of lion king since both are coming of age stories. Not trying to spoil it for anyone. I wonder if my nephew has seen it or not.
One thing I thought was very cleverly done was the look and movement of Spot. There were some strong thematic elements blended into the human.
I loved it and I could care less what snarky reviewers said. It's rendered better than anything I can do and it made back well over a hundred million dollars over production, but that's not why I loved it. You might think the settings were done ultra-relistic because they could and the figures were a little doughy because of the whole Uncanny Valley theory but visually I was stunned and impressed. If you hate things like that and find them formulaic then you will not be disappointed in finding umbrage with the film, but you enjoy the idea of a dinosaur with a pet human and they share an amazing bond and impress on us the value of friendship it's a cute film that can entertain generations. Haters gonna hate, I'm gonna ignore them, it's more fun.
Yes, the CG work is superb. Very impressive. I thought the story was decent enough too, overall it's certainly worth watching.
Watched it with the kids, good stuff, well worth the DVD rental. Pixar tends to hit all the the right beats in a story.