28. The Good Dinosaur

The Good Dinosaur is probably Pixar’s most forgettable film. It’s not the hot mess that Cars 2 is, but it has pretty much come and gone without leaving so much as a cultural footprint. Despite being lost in the annals of the studio’s history, The Good Dinosaur is mostly fine. The survival story is surprisingly brutal to its co-protagonists, Arlo and Spot, a young dinosaur and caveman who go from enemies to friends as they try to make their way home after being swept up in a violent stream and separated from their families. As the two face the harsh elements of the film’s alternate-history world in which dinosaurs never went extinct, they form a close bond, one that takes some unexpectedly dark turns for a Pixar film. It’s fine. It probably didn’t deserve to be Pixar’s first box-office bomb. But it also felt like a turning point for the studio, which had, up to this point, created mostly certified bangers. — KS