Reconsidering Arlo: The Good Dinosaur, Cuteness, and Subverting Meanings of the Dinosaur

Fig. 1 - The Good Dinosaur (Peter Sohn, 2015).

Since its release in 2015, Pixar’s The Good Dinosaur (directed by Peter Sohn) has accrued a less-than-spectacular reputation. At the time of writing this blog, aggregated scores on sites like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic place the film towards the bottom of Pixar’s oeuvre. One reason for The Good Dinosaur’s diminished reputation is arguably temporal. Released less than six months after the celebrated (and eventually Oscar-winning) Inside Out (Pete Doctor and Ronnie Del Carmen, 2011), The Good Dinosaur has regularly been read in its predecessor’s shadow. Peter Bradshaw’s review for The Guardian, demonstrates this trend by praising Inside Out for being “passionate, sophisticated and beguiling” whereas The Good Dinosaur, much like lead character Arlo’s’s coding in the film, represents the runt of Pixar’s litter.

More could be said about the discourses of cultural value that structure critical evaluations of The Good Dinosaur. In this post, however, I’ll analyse Arlo (voiced by Raymond Ochoa), the movie’s gentile-yet-easily-spooked juvenile apatosaurus protagonist, in relation to how the character relates to established tropes concerning the dinosaur in popular (animated) cinema. Whereas many reviewers read The Good Dinosaur through conventions of the Western – which led to interesting subversions of dinosaur characterisations concerning T-rex and velociraptor – this post focuses on The Good Dinosaur’s toying with expectations concerning the ‘nice’ animated herbivore sauropod (Fig. 1).

The Good Dinosaur employs a fantastical ‘what if?’ scenario where the meteor that ended the Mesozoic period misses the Earth. Dinosaurs subsequently remain the planet’s dominant creatures and have evolved to, in the case of Arlo’s family, working the land as arable farmers. Concerning Arlo, though, from the character’s introduction onwards, he is deliberately coded as ‘the cute dinosaur’. Emerging reluctantly from an over-sized egg, and so defying both diegetic and audience expectations for the character’s size, Arlo’s head appears out-of-proportion to the rest of his body and he must be coaxed from the shell by his parents. Upon taking his first steps, Arlo falls clumsily face forward and is playfully hit with a stick by his boisterous sibling, Buck (Ryan Teeple). Arlo is therefore constructed as cautious of his surroundings, unsteady on his feet, and underdeveloped as a new-born (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2 - Baby Arlo.

Baby Arlo’s visual design aligns with established discourses that demarcate ‘cute’ as an aesthetic category. Summarizing Konrad Lorenz’s (1971 [1950]) characteristics of cute animals, Joshua Paul Dale (2017, 41) argues that “a large head relative to body size, large and low eyes, bulging cheeks, a plump body shape with short and thick extremities, a spongy elastic consistency, and wobbly movements” delimit ‘cute’ aesthetics. These conventions are used not only in how baby Arlo is designed and animated but also extend to the juvenile version of the character who we follow throughout the movie. Whilst this older version of Arlo demonstrates a more balanced physiology, the character’s design retains large, sad eyes that flick anxiously from side to side when responding to disembodied diegetic sounds and is animated through awkward body movements. Arlo is thus indicative of how, when cuteness moves from a set of signifiers to encouraging affective responses amongst viewers, the intended reading is one “of triggering a physical and emotional response …what we term the “Aww” factor” (Dale 2017, 35) (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3 - Scared Arlo.

Arlo’s ‘cuteness’ arguably activates memories of juvenile sauropod characters like Littlefoot (narrated by Gabriel Damon) in The Land Before Time (Don Bluth, 1988). However, the idea of ‘the cute dinosaur’ has a much longer heritage as it is indebted to the first animated dinosaur in fantastical animation, Gertie the Dinosaur (Winsor McCay, 1914) (see below). As Jose Luis Sanz (2002: 19) states, “McCoy gave Gertie a sweet and innocent nature, which resembled that of a child, turning a dinosaur into a pet for the first time.” This trend continues today through examples in children’s television like My Petasaurus (CBeebies/BumbyBox 2017- ; a series of short tales for pre-schoolers about a child who owns and looks after a small triceratops named Topsy) to the ‘petting zoo’ scene in Jurassic World (Colin Trevorrow, 2015) where children are seen feeding and riding juvenile dinosaurs.

Gertie the Dinosaur (Winsor McCay, 1914)

However, where Arlo starts subverting expectations for the ‘cute dinosaur’ is that the character does not demonstrate the docility and subservience to human(oid) superiors that characterizes the ‘dinosaur-as-pet’ trope. While sequences like Arlo’s bullying by Buck (voiced as an adult by Marcus Scribner) for fearing the family’s chickens are intended to elicit pity from viewers (another marker of cuteness as a cultural discourse), at no point throughout the film does Arlo become subservient to a human ‘owner’.  If it is the case that cinematic articulations of the dinosaur fall into four classes that include the “affectionate, normally involving the treatment of dinosaurs as pets” and the “exploitative, with the human beings taking advantage of the dinosaurs” (Sanz 2002, 93), then Arlo’s characterization complicates these conventions. The Good Dinosaur’s animated apatosaurus is instead affectionate, and encourages an affective reaction of cuteness, whilst not being exploited by humanoid characters. Instead, The Good Dinosaur separates cuteness and affection out from ‘subservience’ by assigning the former characteristics to Arlo and the latter to feral human child, Spot (Jack Bright) (Fig. 3). This innovation is ideologically significant as it dislodges anthropocentric meanings associated with narratives of human/dinosaur encounter.

Fig. 3 - The Good Dinosaur’s Spot.

The ‘cute/pet’ trope in fantasy and/or animated dinosaurian cinema is ideological in that it performatively positions humanity as the Earth’s ‘rightful’ dominant inhabitants. Brian Noble (2016, 101) suggests these meanings when discussing narratives of encounters between ‘great white hunter’ characters and ferocious carnivores:

the tropes of big game hunting and hunters reside squarely in the narratives of the lost world and the Mesozoic …Tyrannosaurus, Megalosaurus, and Allosaurus displayed vigour, the ability to conquer, to achieve a kind of imperial presence in their times and spaces. They could be and were rendered as the ultimate foes to humanity.

The Arlo/Spot relationship obviously differs to these examples in that The Good Dinosaur codes this encounter as friendship. However, by having Arlo not be subservient to Spot, a critical space emerges for questioning humanity’s right to exploit the Earth and its natural resources. Instead, as the movie’s fantastical premise sets up via Arlo’s family, would a more harmonious relationship with nature, devoid of mass industrialization and consumer capitalism, have endured? Whilst this form of critical thinking may be beyond The Good Dinosaur’s primary child audience, we, as critical media scholars, should remain sensitive to such lines of questioning.

The Good Dinosaur contains these questions, however, as Arlo is regularly assisted by Spot. After being separated from the secure family unit, it is Spot who rescues Arlo when one of his back legs becomes trapped when trying to reach some food. Spot then pities Arlo by bringing things to eat on three occasions as their friendship emerges. Stephanie Merry’s review of The Good Dinosaur for The Washington Post alluded to the significance of these sequences, identifying that within the film “The humans are the beasts in this world. But Spot is tough and clever, and he comes to Arlo’s rescue continually during the pair’s trek home. It turns out man is a dino’s best friend.” The implications of the film’s reversals need greater thinking through, however.

Arlo and his family’s agrarian relationship with nature represents The Good Dinosaur’s coding of ‘culture’ and this works alongside, and within the shadow of, the threats presented by the natural world (the swollen river takes both Arlo and his Poppa (voiced by Jeffrey Wright) away from the family unit; storms enable the predatory behaviour of the Pteranodons). Spot is also arguably representative of savagery whilst also demonstrating attributes that are absent from the ‘cute’ and ‘civilized’ Arlo such as hunting for food. In fact, without the interventions assigned to Spot’s character following Arlo’s separation from his family, events might have taken a turn that’s far too dark for a children’s animation. Ideological speaking, though, humanity’s ‘natural’ dominance, no matter how apparently ‘uncivilized’, becomes reinstated as this species possesses the survival skills that Arlo must learn.

Beyond The Good Dinosaur’s many subversions of the (animated) dinosaurian narrative, there’s much more to be said regarding the film’s construction of T-rexes as cowboys and/or the elevation of Pteranodons, so often either a secondary threat (see Jurassic World and Jurassic Park III [Joe Johnston, 2001]) or relegated to the role of sidekick (see Petrie in The Land Before Time), to the role of primary assailants. At the same time, The Good Dinosaur frequently subverts audience’s narrative-oriented expectations for dialogue and complex plotting or characterization to a focus on landscape and animation-as-an-art form. Each of these points alludes to The Good Dinosaur’s richness as an object of academic interest, whether ideological, aesthetic, generic, or in terms of taste and value. The Good Dinosaur is, in short, well worth another look.

**Article published: June 18, 2021**

References

Dale, Joshua Paul. 2017. “The Abject Appeal of the Cute Object: Desire, Domestication, and Agency.” In The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness, edited by Joshua Paul Dale, Joyce Goggin, Julia Leyda, Anthony P. McIntyre and Diane Negra, 35-55. London: Routledge.

Lorenz, Konrad. 1971 [1950]. Studies in Human and Animal Behaviour, Vol. 2. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Noble, Brian. 2016. Articulating Dinosaurs: A Political Anthropology. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Sanz, José Luis. 2002. Staring T.Rex!: Dinosaur Mythology and Popular Culture. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Biography 

Ross Garner is Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies in the School of Journalism, Media, and Culture at Cardiff University. He is currently researching how audiences consume popular constructions of the Mesozoic period across a variety of contexts ranging including television, film, museums, and material culture.