There”s plenty of Pixar to be had in 2015 – this year marks the first time that the animation studio is releasing two feature films in one calendar year.
That”s in part because it”s been a long journey to the multiplex for “The Good Dinosaur,” Pixar”s film set for a November 25, 2015 release. Originally, the project was scheduled to open Thanksgiving 2013. The delay led to media labeling the film a “troubled toon.” But this isn”t the first time the studio found itself needing to take some unexpected extra time with a project. “Toy Story 2” and “Finding Nemo” both got pushed to later release dates, and delay gave Pixar time to work out the kinks in those films and deliver yet another fan- and critic-favorite.
Director Peter Sohn – who originally was co-directing the film with “Up” director Bob Peterson before he departed the project – told HitFix he was well aware of the concerned murmurs about the film as its released date got pushed. How he handled soldiering forward with the project in that atmosphere was by “believing in the heart of the movie,” he said. “I believe in these characters. It would always be about trying to make the best film it can be, no matter the state that you are in.”
With the movie”s release date just under two months away, Sohn and his fellow filmmakers welcomed a group of reporters into Pixar Animation Studios as they showed off their film. We got a closer look at this boy and his dog story, where the twist is that the boy is an 11-year-old dinosaur and the dog is a human boy. “The Good Dinosaur” takes place in a world where no asteroid ever hit Earth and wiped out the dinosaurs, so dinos came to live side-by-side with humans.
The creative team on the film now know a thing or two about evolution – both from studying dinosaurs and from seeing their film evolve to the one that”s just about ready to open in theaters. Take a look at how “The Good Dinosaur” evolved into the film it is now in the gallery below, where HitFix walks you through 10 things we learned about how Pixar”s latest feature was researched, designed, written, animated and lit: