The premise – What if dinosaurs were dirt-farmers? – doesn't have quite the appealing ring as Toy Story's what if toys were alive? Or Inside Out's what if feelings had feelings? But the overture, in which an asteroid fails to impact at Chicxulub, Mexico, some 65 million years ago, promises real good, possibly yabba-dabba-do time.

Not quite. Instead, a story credited to five authors and an additional screenwriter congeals into an overlong weepie family drama stapled together from bits of other weepie family dramas: the parental loss of Bambi, the final farewell of The Jungle Book and the incredible journey of, well, Incredible Journey. It is, additionally, a western, replete with T-rex ranchers and murderous, marauding Pterodactylus.

There’s quite enough going on but just to add to the structural flaws: Arlo, the film’s young hero, is a likeable creation but he needs far fewer lines; he repeatedly explains his own actions where wordless visuals and comedy might suffice. And then there’s internal logic issues: why do they plough with their heads in the soil instead of using their tails? How are the dinosaurs tying knots without opposable thumbs?

To be fair, the film is less of a gumbo than it might be. The central buddy pairing between Arlo the Apatosaurus and Spot the cave-boy makes for cutes and feels; the landscapes are flawless and younger amateur palaeontologists will be pleased by the inclusion of such lesser-spotted beasts as the Styracosaurus (who gets the best lines in the picture).

The Good Dinosaur is a much better film than Cars but the newer movie's propensity for sentimentality and Americana does indeed recall the earlier, unlovely Pixar adventure.

In common with John Lasseter’s 2006 franchise- starter, the marriage of highly cartoonish characters on highly realistic backgrounds is not always a happy one.

Ultimately, that won’t matter to the bottom line: dinosaurs, like motor vehicles, will always shift lunch boxes and duvet covers.