THE ODD COUPLE
The Good Dinosaur’s Peter Sohn set out on an adventure
Peter Sohn knows all about the long and winding road of getting an animated movie made. The first-time director started The Good Dinosaur journey with co-director Bob Peterson six years ago.
When Disney-Pixar head John Lasseter decided to reroute the narrative and the approach, Sohn found himself going solo on the project in 2013 — but not quite alone.
“The support system at Pixar gives you a kind of confidence to attempt different things,” Sohn says. “They were all there from the beginning until the end.”
What Sohn, Lasseter and friends came up with is a yearning adventure set in an imaginary prehistoric world in which dinosaurs escape extinction and coexist with humans on earth. A young Apatosaurus named Arlo (voiced by Raymond Ochoa) gets separated from his family, and tries to find his way back by teaming up with an orphaned feral boy he calls Spot (Jack Bright).
Together, the unlikely duo escape predators and violent storms in their quest to find safe haven by returning to Arlo’s familiar territory.
Rounding out the voice cast are Jeffrey Wright and Frances McDormand who are Arlo’s parents. Steve Zahn is the Pterodactylus gang leader Thunderclap. Sam Elliott has some comic-relief moments as a gristled T-Rex alongside Anna Paquin as a Tyrannosaurus rex colleague. But Arlo and Spot are the featured attractions.
“The Good Dinosaur is really all about the necessary journey that leads to the telling of a growing-up story,” Sohn says.
The 42-year-old had other challenges during his two years of working. For one thing, the tone of The Good Dinosaur emphasizes an unlikely animated mix of comedy and bittersweet emotional moments.
“So we are taking advantage of the concept of a buddy movie, where Arlo and Spot are in conflict until they start appreciating each other,” Sohn says.
While Arlo and Spot tend to be presented as cartoonish exaggerations, the landscapes are hyper-real redefinitions of an imagined prehistoric time. To that end, The Good Dinosaur team of key animators trekked to the U.S. Northwest, copying the contrasting vistas of open plains and rugged mountain peaks for the film’s vivid backgrounds.
“All of the design choices were made to make the world heightened, which I think makes the story more connected to the land,” Sohn says.
Raised in New York, he attended the California Institute of the Arts and then landed a summer job working on Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant. After graduating, he worked at Disney and Warner Bros. before showing up at Pixar to join the art and story departments on Finding Nemo.
Sohn was also part of the crew on The Incredibles, Ratatouille (in which he did the voice of Emile), and Wall-E, before directing a short called Partly Cloudy and the English-language version of Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea with Lasseter.
Indeed, his instincts and attitude are entrenched in the Pixar way of doing things, which allowed him to relax a bit at one point during the intense Good Dinosaur production.
“The story started finding itself,” Sohn says. “They talk a lot about that at Pixar. The story starts to talk to you, and it’s very clear when it starts telling you what to do that things will be OK.”