If you, like me, when watching an animated movie for kids tend to end up on that annoying crossroads of judging the film on its intrinsic qualities and trying to trying to transport yourself to the mindset of the target audience, you'll have a tough time with the Good Dinosaur.

If you, like me, have a five year old son to watch it with and show you which path to take the Good Dinosaur will feel like a warm bath with a strong moral compass.

A simplistic plot with an overbearing message can be really annoying. The Good Dinosaur definitely suffers from that, but in its simplicity and dime-a-dozen thematic arch it manages to appeal to a universal sense of…

83/100

The Good Dinosaur is infused with failure. In terms of critical and audience reception, it seemed predestined from the very beginning, with production troubles selling uneven construction and Inside Out setting the bar so unnaturally high for the 2015 cinematic year. It's also a film that literally begins with failure, setting the themes for an unusually quiet and delicate piece of plotless beauty. Showcasing a proud dinosaur couple awaiting the hatching of their three eggs, the viewer witnesses the birth of the first two young dinosaurs, but the third, surrounded by a massive egg shell, doesn't even break out until his brother comes along and knocks the shell with a stick.

It is this tender, almost "gee-whiz" dash of…

While the year of 2014 was the first in nearly a decade that didn't feature any film from Pixar Animation Studios, 2015 marks the first time that this pioneering studio has released two movies in the same year. The first was Inside Out which signalled the much-awaited return to form for Pixar after their quality slump in the past few movies. The second arrived just recently in the form of The Good Dinosaur that employs Pixar's signature thinking process that begins with the idea of "what if…" and is a technical marvel but purely from storytelling perspective, it's one of their least impressive works.

Set in an alternate timeline in which the asteroid that destroyed the dinosaurs missed Earth, The…

In the opening minutes of The Good Dinosaur it establishes an interesting world. It first uses a genuinely fun scene to explain where the plot takes place, then shows a world where dinosaurs have taken up human roles, such as farming, and shows the world these dinosaurs have established due to not being extinct.

The rest of the plot completely flushes this interesting world down whatever this world's equivalent of a toilet is. The world it uses instead is just one that looks beautiful and is filled with dinosaurs, who all do things one would really expect a dinosaur to do, no real human characteristics anymore. The overall journey is filled with mostly bland events, save for a few interesting…