Yes, along with this week’s Inside Out, there will be two Pixar movies released in 2015. The other film, The Good Dinosaur, an infamously troubled production, will be released on November 25. On Wednesday in New York City, Pixar held an event to screen some footage from The Good Dinosaur and introduce its director – its second director – Peter Sohn to the press.
First, let’s back up a bit: In a nutshell, the story idea of The Good Dinosaur wasn’t up to Pixar’s standards, so its original director, Bob Peterson, was replaced by Peter Sohn and the film was pushed from 2014 to 2015, resulting in the first time that two Pixar movies will be released in the same calendar year. Now, it’s not all doom and gloom, obviously there must have always been something special about The Good Dinosaur because it didn’t receive the same fate at Newt, a film that was supposed to be released in 2012, but was scrapped altogether.
Now, back to today. This was an interesting event because it very much felt like, “Okay, let’s all take a deep breath, things will be fine.” I’d estimate that 70 percent of the presentation was just Peter Sohn telling us about his life and career – from his parents immigrating from Korea, to working on his first film, Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant, to now directing a feature-length film of his own. (Sohn honestly seems like the nicest guy. He’s at the same time sympathetic and inspiring, and it’s a good strategy to trot him out to talk about the film.)
There wasn’t a lot of footage, just a few minutes. It’s a weird dichotomy: The landscapes look super-realistic – there’s a scene of rain falling on leaves that looks real – yet the characters, specifically the dinosaurs, look cartoonish. The story is about a young dinosaur named Arlo. In the film, the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago misses the planet, so the dinosaurs now roam the Earth at the same time as the early days of humans. After being separated from his family, Arlo meets Spot, a young human who is more beast than person. Basically, Spot doesn’t speak, so it’s the “boy and his dog” story, only inverted. During the presentation, Sohn mentioned that The Good Dinosaur will focus more on imagery than it will dialogue.
During a post-footage Q&A, Sohn was asked about the problems associated with the film. He responded:
To do something that’s original and new is a really difficult thing. I say that with complete sincerity without making it cliché sounding at all. It’s very difficult. In terms of raising a film, some films can get very complicated. Early on with this one, there were so many ideas to go with, it just started getting really heavy. For me, I really love the heart of this thing of being this kind of boy and dog story. In the boy and dog concept, it’s different from the kind of buddy film, where there are two characters always in conflict with each other. In this type of coming of age story, it’s always one character in conflict with the other. Here, Arlo is dealing with a lot of issues with himself and his father’s death and has a hole in it — where Spot has no conflict with Arlo whatsoever, but Spot begins to fill that hole in a way that’s hopefully very emotional.
It’s a weird thing to see Pixar nervous. Now, being nervous doesn’t mean anything about the eventual quality of the film. And we were told over and over that other beloved Pixar movies have had similar problems, but this one is a little different because it led to a change of director and a long delay. Regardless, Sohn is adamant that his heart and soul has been poured into this film (he actually showed an animated version of himself placing his heart into his work), and I do hope that he pulls it off.
Mike Ryan has written for The Huffington Post, Wired, Vanity Fair and New York. He is senior entertainment writer at Uproxx. You can contact him directly on Twitter.
