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Even with this summer’s staggering ‘Inside Out’ still visible in the rearview mirror, the vistas of Pixar’s ‘The Good Dinosaur’ take your breath away. Sun-dappled streams, swaying trees and an almost palpable sense of changeable weather shock you with their photorealism – and strain against the movie’s slightly tired story of an anthropomorphised boy dinosaur who, separated from his prehistoric family, must go on a journey of self-discovery.
His companion is a grunting human child and together they wander into scenes that play, charmingly, like grungy moments from a Sam Peckinpah western, complete with savage hillbilly velociraptors, chatty campfires and herds of cattle. Elsewhere, the film falls into weird lulls and sentimentality. It all feels like a lot of heavy lifting to get to the same old lessons about kinship and finding your clan.