The Good Dinosaur is a beautifully bland adventure

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      Featuring the voices of Raymond Ochoa and Sam Elliott. Rated G. Now playing

      Apatosauruses ploughing corn fields and T-rexes herding longhorn cattle on the open plain? This is the rather strange universe imagined in the western-tinged The Good Dinosaur, which imagines a world where the comet never destroyed Jurassic giants and they evolved into talking, agrarian societies.

      But where Pixar’s gentle new cartoon really turns evolution upside down is in the role human beings play in all this. Arlo, the runt of his farming family, is a klutzy green apatosaurus who gets lost in the wilderness and has to find the long way home. He hooks up with a feral little boy he calls Spot along the way—the latter running around on all fours and hissing and growling to communicate. It’s a subversive idea to put humans this low on the food and intelligence chain, and subtly prods us to reconsider our supremacy on Earth.

      Unfortunately, The Good Dinosaur doesn’t push the idea much further than that, following a journey-quest script that borrows liberally from The Lion King, The Jungle Book, and The Land Before Time. Arlo and Spot meet dozens of cool critters along the way, from an army of fuzzy prairie dogs to marauding pterodactyls and hillbilly raptors. But the story really sings only when its creators stray from the formula—as when Sam Elliott, playing a T-rex, tells the story behind his giant scar, or the pair ingests some mind-altering fruit.

      The animation does have spectacular, photorealistic scenery of rushing river rapids, swaying barley fields, and fireflies swirling up from long grass—creating a weird disconnect with the primitively drawn, albeit three-dimensionally portrayed, dinos.

      Still, there’s enough mild fun and lovingly conjured critters here to please small children, and a few touching moments between the dino-boy and his dog-boy. Plus, it’s not the worst thing for kids to see what the world might look like if humankind hadn’t paved over the planet.

      Follow Janet Smith on Twitter @janetsmitharts.

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