How to Fix the "Good Dinosaur"

Welcome to Cinema Struggle, where the struggle is reel…you get it? Cause you know movie reel...*clear throat* moving on.

Let’s be honest guys, we haven’t been getting the best movies as of a late. This past summer has got to be one of the most disappointing summers for the box office in a long while. Between increasingly bad D.C. movies that make us wonder why we keep getting our hopes up in the first place, to even some movies that weren’t that bad, such as “Finding Dory” and “Star Trek Beyond” that seemed to drown when coming out around the same time as “Independence Day Resurgence”, “Alice Through the Looking Glass”, “Ghostbusters” and *shudder* “Batman v. Superman”. But the truth is that we can learn just as much if not more from bad movies as we can the good ones. We can learn from the mistakes these stories made so that when we try to tell them again in the future we will have a greater chance of success. What do I mean? Well, let’s start with our first example. Ladies and gents, Cinema Struggle proudly presents, “How to Fix the Good Dinosaur”.

So, let’s start with the elephant in the room, or in this case, the dinosaur. Our story follows a young Brachiosaurus named Arlo who is the runt of his family but wants to be able to make his literal mark as his other family members have earned. Through an unfortunate set of circumstances Arlo gets separated from his family and with the help of a little Neanderthal whom he affectionately names Spot, attempts to brave the big dangerous world and return home. On paper this seems like a basic adventure story that companies such as Disney and Pixar should be able to pull off quite well. But if there’s one thing that can sink any movie faster than the S.S. Minnow it’s an unlikable protagonist.

Arlo doesn’t do anything wrong per-se, but he is awfully whiny. Add a pre-pubescent voice actor and poorly written lines and it’s going to be incredibly difficult to like your hero. Hero’s don’t always have to be great people, but the audience must relate to them on some level, and want them to succeed. With Arlo being afraid of anything and everything (with varying inconsistencies) it emphasizes how whiny he sounds. About an hour through this you start hoping that the terrifying pterodactyls eat him. Yeah, that bad.

There is a simple way to fix this and it makes Arlo far more likable. We see at the beginning of the film that despite being a large egg, Arlo was the runt of the family. Being a small dinosaur, Arlo struggles against a world that is out to eat the little guys and he desperately wants to make his mark as his bigger and stronger brother and sister have. But for some reason the writers make him afraid of almost everything. Either one of these are natural conflicts that real children and even adults can relate to. Everyone struggles with finding their place in life and there are a lot of people who are afraid of everything the world has in store. But the combination of these conflicts leave little to no room for and good qualities to show off in our protagonist. We’re spending so much time focusing on everything Arlo isn’t rather than seeing what he is.

But what if instead the writers had made him the runt and have him try to do things the “big” way like his brother, sister, and parents do. We would see him struggle trying to overcome his size and not being able to complete the challenges the same way the rest of his family could. We could then have the same relationship story between him and his father as his father tries to help him realize that being small doesn’t have to be a terrible thing and needs to learn how to do things his way. Then when Arlo is forced to make his journey with the human Spot, he could then see how Spot deals with the world despite being much smaller than most of the other dinosaurs. There is even a scene in the movie with characters that I enjoyed that are cowboy Tyrannosaurus Rex and they could have a conversation about how they have jobs that, despite being very small, they should find a way to adjust because of their large size. This scene would become more touching and would help Arlo to truly overcome his challenges while becoming a well-rounded and relatable character. By focusing on overcoming his size, rather than a fear of everything would make his struggle more relatable as many of us must overcome physical nature and sometimes have to learn to adapt them. This would even play into a traditional theme of nature itself or adaption, migration, or death giving a traditional “Pixar” spin to the movie that we have come to know and appreciate.

With a few changes to a character’s motivation you can make a protagonist go from whiny and annoying, to sympathetic and gain a desire to watch them overcome their struggles. So, for other writers out there looking to give their character’s relatable flaws, I would recommend looking closely at your story and what type of journey you want your character to go through. Giving them several weaknesses to work through does not necessarily make them understandable, and in fact can distance them from the audience if you fail to show off their strengths. I would go as far to say that if you character one flaw and focus on how that effects their everyday life, the journey to overcome it will be far more impressive.

And that was how to fix Disney and Pixar’s “The Good Dinosaur” I hope you were able to learn something and enjoyed my take on the story. If you have any suggestions for my next “How to Fix” leave a suggestion in the comments. #TheStruggleIsREEL!