YMMV / The Good Dinosaur

• Accidental Aesop: Recklessness will get you killed faster than fear, especially out in nature.
• Adorkable: Arlo is clumsy, nervous and a real sweetheart.
• Alternate Character Interpretation: Considering the religion analogues to Thunderclap's characterization, it's not unreasonable to think that he's using his obsession with the storm as an excuse to hurt others.
  • There's another possible aspect to Thunderclap and his flock: They were fulfilling a very common and very important role in nature of opportunistic/ambush predators. It's VERY common practice for predators to follow in the wake of natural forces that stir up or weaken their prey; with starvation always looming, easy prey is something *every* predator hopes for. Eating a half-drowned small animal? A lucky day for a predator! Anything that's small enough to choke down or tear apart is fair game - and that includes Spot.
  • However, the Moral Event Horizon gets crossed when they decided to try and murder Arlo, not because they wanted to eat him, but out of sheer spite and For the Evulz.
• Audience-Alienating Era: This film left fans wondering if Pixar was still in one and if the massive success of Inside Out was a fluke. This turned out to be the last film in this era, as the critical and commercial success of Finding Dory put them back on track for the rest of the decade, even if not to the heights of the late 2000's.
• Award Snub: While nobody expected it to beat Inside Out for the Kids' Choice Awards, most people expected it to just be nominated. It wasn't.
• Awesome Music: "Crystals" by Of Monsters and Men, featured in the trailer.
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Arlo. Some people see him as The Woobie for losing his father early into the movie, others can't stand his ridiculously whiny and bratty attitude.
  • Spot. While plenty of people call him the best thing about the movie, due to being a Cute Mute, who expresses emotion through facial expressions and gestures alone, particularly citing the scene of him showing Arlo that he's orphaned as the perfect example of Show, Don't Tell, he gets flak for his uninspired design and character concept, being a case of All Animals Are Dogs used on a human, which many found ridiculous.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: When Arlo and Spot hallucinate after eating the rotten food. As hilarious as it is, the scene comes out of absolutely nowhere and lasts all of 30 seconds before the film moves on to something else.
• Broken Base: Arlo and the other dinosaurs' design. It either hits a sweet spot of making them stand out without going overboard and making them seem out of place, or is very jarring and too "cartoony" for a movie with such realistic environments.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: The Tyrannosaurus ranchers. Especially Butch, with the concept of a cowboy T. rex alone and the perfect casting of Sam Elliott, with some reviews have suggested he get his own spin-off. It helps that they are portrayed as heroes, a stark contrast to most animated dinosaur films putting T. rex or other large carnivores as the Big Bad.
• Evil Is Cool: Thunderclap's flock and Bubbha's pack.
• He Really Can Act: Steve Zahn, known for his many comedy roles, does a surprisingly chilling performance as the psychotic pterodactyl Thunderclap.
• He's Just Hiding: Plenty of viewers argue that Henry is still alive, given that Arlo managed to survive all kinds of physical punishment, despite being much smaller and more fragile than his father. The fact that we never actually saw him die on-screen helps.
• Narm:
  • The sheer amount of physical punishment Arlo goes through can get hard to take seriously after a while.
  • Arlo’s Mighty Roar in the climax. It comes up rather abruptly and feels jarring coming out of a small teenage dinosaur. Thunderclap’s dumbfounded expression afterwards only adds to it.
• One-Scene Wonder: Forrest Woodbrush only appears once in the movie and just gets Spot named, but damn, if he isn't one of the most memorable characters in it...
• Slow-Paced Beginning: Things are rather quiet until Arlo and Spot start to bond.
• So Okay, It's Average: The closest viewers can come to a middle ground. Few would call this an awful movie, and it definitely has Pixar's trademark charm and visuals along with some great characters like Butch and the T. rex ranchers (thanks to Sam Elliot) and Thunderclap (thanks to Steve Zahn's chilling performance), but it also has a very simplistic and familiar "coming of age on our own" plot and a disjointed story resulting from its infamous Troubled Production.
• Special Effects Failure: One of the main criticisms of the film is that the graphically exaggerated dinosaur designs clash with the near photorealistic environments.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Many of the characters in the film's meager cast only appear for a minute or two at the most (such as the raptor rustlers, Arlo's siblings, and Forrest Woodbrush), and don't get much development outside of their basic traits.
  • The Forrest Woodbrush in particular deserves a special mention. He has a ton of potential to be an interesting character due to the establishing of how he has befriended many of the woodland critters, and many of them clearly exhibit a close bond with him in some way, a major contrast to how Arlo views critters up to this point. However, of the characters listed above, his scene lasts the shortest amount of time, and the only purpose it serves is to give Spot a name and make Arlo realize he wants to keep him. He is promptly discarded and never mentioned again afterwards.
• Tough Act to Follow: Due to its release being pushed to 2015, the film had to follow the massively successful and popular Inside Out a mere five months later. To make matters worse, The Good Dinosaur had a rather simple and familiar story while Inside Out was praised for its distinctive plot and characters. Needless to say, it didn't stand a chance. In addition to Inside Out, The Good Dinosaur's concept meant it had to also live up to both The Land Before Time and Dinosaur.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The CGI on the environments is so realistic it's confused a number of people into thinking the backgrounds were live action with animated characters pasted on it, like Dinosaur. No matter what people had to say regarding the story and the characters, everyone pretty much agrees the visuals are beautiful.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: The movie was criticized by parents for being surprisingly violent for a PG-rated movie (but they might be at fault as well for acting like it's a G-rated movie even though it's rated PG, which should have implied that it's not necessarily for young children) for things such as Poppa Henry's death, the acid trip sequence, the part where Thunderclap eats a cute little animal onscreen, Spot tearing apart a bug and forcing Arlo to eat it, Spot peeing on one of the dinosaurs when he meets them, and one of the dinosaurs having a violent backstory, which was said to traumatize several children. This is considered by some industry experts as a major reason why the movie bombed.
• Win Back the Crowd: Pixar attempted to do this by taking a year off to overhaul all of the story's problems in an effort to end their Audience-Alienating Era once and for all, and while it was a smart move, the still-unpolished end result got caught in the undertow of a handful of other movies, including Pixar's hugely successful Inside Out.
• The Woobie:
  • Arlo gets put through a ton of crap in the movie. It starts with him losing his father and it only goes downhill from there. Luckily, he gets better.
  • The rest of Arlo's family, particularly Ida, are quite pitiable due to how their farm kinda went downhill when Henry kicked the bucket.
  • Spot reveals himself as this when he shows he's an orphan.

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