Jurassic Arc
Director Peter Sohn talks up his incredible journey on The Good Dinosaur...
Director Peter Sohn STARRING (voices) Raymond Ochoa, Jeffrey Wright, Steve Zahn, Anna Paquin, AJ Buckley ETA 27 November
Pixar films are massive box office. Jurassic World is the third biggest movie of all time. So a Pixar movie about dinosaurs should break the box office, right?
But back in June, there were doubters, with many sensing blood when it was announced that
The Good Dinosaur had changed nearly all of its voice cast. Given co-director Bob Petersen and producer John Walker exited the project in the summer of 2013, The Good Dinosaur was suddenly being viewed as the Waterworld of animation movies. Well, don’t believe a word of it (and besides,
Waterworld is actually pretty good...). Chatting to Total Film, director Peter Sohn is in infectiously good spirits as he waves away any naysaying.
“What’s funny is that the announcements came out so late, but we had done those changes a year before, or a year-and-a-half earlier,” he says. “It was all because of the main character. When we decided to make him younger – a boy – and thought of how to play that with the dinosaur, it kind of had a domino effect, and all these other characters had to change and fit that main age.”
The concept has always been the same, though: what if the asteroid missed Earth rather than wiping out the dinosaurs, and our hero, a young Apatosaurus named Arlo (originally Lucas Neff, now Raymond Ochoa), falls into a river, knocks himself out and awakens far from home, thus beginning an epic journey back to his family with the help of a caveboy called Spot (Jack Bright)?
“It was always a ‘boy and a dog’ story,” confirms Sohn, “but the fun was flipping that concept and making the dinosaur the ‘boy’, and the human boy the ‘dog’!”
Of course, any fears that The Good Dinosaur might not live up to its title were spectacularly quashed when the first trailer landed to “oohs” and “aahs” in late July, with the world falling in love with the gorgeously cartoony Arlo trekking through vast, photo-realistic landscapes. The idea, says Sohn, is to make the environment both “scary and beautiful” for our hero, and to also reflect his emotional journey through nature. “Part of the movie takes place along a river,” he explains. “It’s his Yellow Brick Road to travel back home. If Arlo is in turmoil internally, the river will be rough. When he’s calm, the river becomes like glass.”
Given his quest runs him into a pack of T-rexes (Anna Paquin, Sam Elliott, A. J. Buckley) and a pterodactyl named Thunderclap, you can bet that river is doing plenty of churning.
The Good Dinsoaur, it should be noted, is Sohn’s first directing gig after 15 years at Pixar, during which he’s worked as a story artist, storyboard artist and additional production artist on some of the company’s best titles: Finding Nemo, The Incredibles,
Ratatouille, WALL · E, Up and Toy Story 3. So how does it feel, finally taking the reins?
“I feel like Arlo a bit!” he laughs. “There were a lot of fears in me. Growing confident throughout this journey has been really interesting; I feel like I have grown up.” Sohn is quick to compliment all of the people around him – “They’re so talented, they give their heart every time” – and talks openly of how he views Pixar as family, saying, “I’m Asian-American and I grew up very much about the externals: my skin colour, my culture. Finding Pixar, I’ve realised this is my tribe.” Which is kind of like the fearful Arlo searching for his family, surely? “I haven’t thought about that but I bet that snuck in,” he says. “When you put your heart into the work, it’s going to seep in there.”