The digital landscapes are meant to be breathtakingly beautiful, but they tend to come across more like very expensive screensavers or immersive desktop wallpapers.
The Good Dinosaur is by no means a bad movie. But it breaks new ground for Pixar in that it's the studio's first feature that is explicitly-and pretty much exclusively-a kid's movie.
Even for a Pixar production, this is a technically stunning piece of animation, and there's great use of landscape and water that often provides a stark contrast to the more cuddly central characters.
If The Good Dinosaur falls low in the rankings of the company's now 16 titles, it is still leagues finer than the flurry of frenetic colors and screwball pacing of the standard children's animated movie.
