Armed with early footage, character art, storyboards and even a brilliant on-screen flick-book of his own life story, director Peter Sohn arrived in London yesterday to reveal how 2015’s second Pixar movie, The Good Dinosaur, is shaping up.
“We’re trying to create something you’ve never seen before,” he told Empire — though the premise of **The Good Dinosaur **might feel familiar to Pixar fans. Like every other Pixar movie, the creative start point is a 'what if?' scenario. But this time it’s a huge one: what if, all those millions of years ago, that asteroid had missed Earth, and dinosaurs had not only avoided extinction, but continued evolving well into the era that humanity first appeared?
The story’s hero is a young Apatosaurus named Arlo (Raymond Ochoa), described by Sohn as “a little goofy kid” who works with his family on their farm (yes, as well as being able to speak, these dinos know agriculture), until tragedy strikes and he’s whisked miles away by a raging river. On his long journey back, he befriends a strange little creature — a human boy named ‘Spot — and together they must face the many dangers that the wilderness throws at them.
“It’s a boy and dog relationship,” Sohn explained, except the ‘boy’ is a dinosaur and the ‘dog’ is a boy. While they face feathered velociraptors, a ravenous flock of pterodactyls (one of which is voiced by Steve Zahn) and a family of T-Rexs (Sam Elliott, Anna Paquin and A.J. Buckley), the prime antagonist of this tale is Mother Nature herself. “It’s a place that can eat him up,” Sohn said, but which is also capable of “blowing him away” with its sheer beauty.
The audience was certainly blown away by the footage, which revealed Arlo’s frantic river-ride, and a gorgeous, inventive scene in which Arlo and Spot share their tales of grief and woe... Without a single word spoken between them. A major influence on Sohn was Dumbo, and that’s certainly apparent here in what the director summed up as “an emotional coming of age story.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, there was little talk of** The Good Dinosaur**’s long and difficult production, during which it suffered various setbacks and saw its original director, Bob Petersen, replaced by Sohn. Only last Friday came the announcement that most of the voice cast (except Frances McDormand, who plays Arlo’s mother) had been replaced. The director did admit that storytelling at Pixar could be “a kind of violent process; you build something and tear it down, then build it again. It’s not easy, but you find a way to get through. It was a tough thing, but at the same time it is like a family at Pixar.”
The Good Dinosaur is out on November 27.