When it comes to CGI movie animation, nobody does it quite as well as Pixar and their latest trailer for The Good Dinosaur epitomises this better than ever before with some stunning visuals combining well with the quirky characters that it has created for the film. While the initial teaser trailer did more than enough to build expectations for the film, the full official trailer, which you can see for yourself below, hits it for six with just enough fleeting glimpses of what to look forward to.
Set for release in the UK on the 27th November 2015, following on from the US release date a couple of days earlier on the 25th, The Good Dinosaur is the second Disney Pixar movie release of the year with Inside Out having already landed well with critics and box office numbers. From the look of the official trailer below, the dinosaur meets early human kid story could be just as successful, especially with such impressive animation.
The environmental texture is one of the coolest features in the video, looking about as close to reality as you’d ever really want from a Pixar movie. The level of detail is astounding with foliage, rock formations, clouds, dust trails and even the very ground beneath their feet looking incredibly authentic beyond the level of anything else that’s gone before it.
Water looks pretty impressive too, whether it’s the shimmer of rain droplets on leaves, the hazy mist in the fields of grazing charonosaurus or the fast moving river rapids our little Apatosaurus gets stuck in. It’s added to by some very sophisticated lighting effects. Hairline framing in backlit scenes is just one of many subtle little touches that the animation team behind the film have laboured over and they’re just as effective at making the film stand out so well as the fireflies that cast a little magic over a few of the scenes or the epic shafts of light that cut through the sky in others.
While the landscape and environmental features in the trailer have been designed with a lot of realism, the characters are much more stylised and cartoon-like, which you can see throughout the video. Arlo, the good little dinosaur of the title, has got outsized features that make him look pretty clumsy in comparison to the average youthful Apatosaurus and his skin is a very vivid green. Equally, the proto-man cub he goes on to befriend is more like a cross between Jack-Jack from the incredible and a very young Liono from Thundercats.
However, even in the characters there’s a lot of detail that has been added, which was one of the surprise elements of the animation of Joy from Inside Out. Check out some of the close-ups of Arlo’s skin to see how much texture they’ve created to make him feel as real as possible, despite the dinosaur characterisation that they’ve given him. It makes for a good combination and we’re looking forward to seeing more of the film when it’s released later in 2015.
Not all of the dinosaurs look as well crafted as Arlo though with the snake and the tyrannosaurs, which you can see in the video below, feeling a bit too rudimentary to have the same impact. However, our money is on The Good Dinosaur to go on to be at least as successful as Inside Out has already been this year.
