Arlo & Spot

If you can make it through the tedious first third, it's not a bad little movie. The interplay between Arlo and Spot is generally enjoyable (the first really good scene is Spot trying to feed Arlo). The movie can be quite funny, somewhat thrilling, and occasionally touching.

So basically, if this was some kids cartoon from some lesser studio, this would be pretty good. For Pixar though, it's a big disappointment.

One of the film's biggest flaws is also one of its greatest strengths; the animation. On the one hand, the landscapes - forests, rivers, fields - have an amazing photo-realism that mark them as an incredible achievement in animation. But this hyper-realism makes the main dinosaur breed look terrible; they are about as realistic as the cars in Cars, and it's like someone filmed a sock puppet show in the Grand Canyon. It's the thing most reviewers seem to talk about, so it's rather amazing that Pixar didn't see the problem themselves.

It's not that the dinosaurs needed to look real, but the insistence on those giant, soulful eyes made the heads misshapen, and the colors are too clean and shiny to meld with the environments. Other breeds of dinosaurs and insects have an acceptable cartooniness, but Arlo is just annoying in design, creating a constant de-immersion signal.

The story is conventional and predictable, the emotional moments feel manipulative, but still, it's not bad as kid's cartoons go. But it sure isn't what we expect from Pixar.