A dinosaur's best friend

PIXAR, THE MOVIE studio that rules the animation cosmos, is about to do something it’s never done before – release a second feature in a single year. As if it weren’t enough to have 98 per cent of cinema critics adore the extraordinary “journey through the mind” that was “Inside Out”, we have another journey – this one into prehistory with “The Good Dinosaur”.

The reptile of the title is one of those can’t-miss-adorable runts of the litter, a little Apatosaurus named Arlo and, wouldn’t you know it, he falls into a river and is swept far, far from home.

Forced to face his fears and tough it out in the harsh wilderness as he tries to get back to his clan, Arlo makes an unlikely friend, a human boy named Spot, who helps Arlo realise he’s capable of much more than he thought. 

Pixar president Jim Morris was in Singapore recently promoting the movie, so, flashing our Certified Nerd card, we got to point out to him that humans never co-existed with dinosaurs. Apparently he already knew that.

 

“THE GOOD DINOSAUR” WAS SCHEDULED FOR RELEASE TWO YEARS AGO. WHY THE DELAY?

The original story was very different from this one. We had the little dinosaur rebelling against his conformist community, a bit like “Billy Elliot”. But then we hit a wall: We didn’t want to a movie where the hero is fighting against his community so that his home becomes the “antagonist”. So we had to start over again, and we ended up with this prehistoric “buddy road movie”.

 

PIXAR’S NOW PART OF DISNEY. HOW DID THEY TAKE THE NEWS?

It was hard to tell the company that we screwed up and had to start over again, but Disney was very supportive. We just felt that it wasn’t going to be a great film – a good one, but not excellent – and we didn’t want settle for that. It was very expensive and involved a lot of people. It was not a fun thing! But there are enough bad movies out there, and we don’t want to contribute any more.

 

DINOSAURS HAVE APPEARED IN SEVERAL PIXAR FILMS. WHAT’S THE GREAT APPEAL?

Most kids have a fascination with dinosaurs, and at Pixar we like those setting and those types of characters, so we naturally gravitated to it. [Pixar director] Andrew Stanton has said that making movies is like what a palaeontologist does – out in the wilderness finding one dinosaur bone and then another. Our creative process is like that. Sometimes you think you’ve found a brontosaurus, but it turns out to be a stegosaurus, and that’s when you realise the movie needs to go in a different direction.

 

WHY IS IT THAT ARLO THE DINOSAUR BEHAVES LIKE A HUMAN AND THE HUMAN BOY SPOT ACTS LIKE A DOG?

The whole premise is “what if?” What if the asteroid that’s believed to have struck the earth, killing off all the dinosaurs, had instead missed? The dinosaurs had been around a lot longer than humans and had developed the gift of communication, so the human became almost pet-like to them. This role reversal offered a lot of comedy as well as emotion.

 

WHY IS ARLO AN APATOSAURUS IN PARTICULAR?

It let us make a tall, gangly character that looks awkward when he’s doing certain things. He’s unsteady and juvenile because of those long limbs. The more compact dinosaurs don’t have much animation capability, and we needed to give Arlo that child-like quality.

 

ALSO, ONCE AGAIN, WE HAVE A FAMILY BEING SPLIT UP, ANOTHER PIXAR TRAIT.

It’s seems like it’s tradition for us to lose a parent, right? Actually it’s a narrative device to create a lot of drama and get you into an emotional state very quickly. It’s also a convention of western films. In the American west [of the 1800s] there was a high mortality rate, so it wasn’t uncommon for people to lose their parents. “The Good Dinosaur” tips its hat to the western genre.

 

PIXAR IS FAMED FOR ITS TECHNOLOGICAL INGENUITY. WHAT’S NEW WITH THIS FILM?

Actually, if you look at the scenery in “The Good Dinosaur”, you’ll notice it’s very realistic, almost like photography. We wanted it to be very believable and real so that the characters would seem to be in jeopardy when venturing through these landscapes. 

So we scanned US geological survey maps using a Lidar scanner and used that to create our own topography. In the US, dinosaur bones have mostly been found in Montana and Wyoming, so the government maps from those states became the underlying geometry of our scenes. Then we populated the scenes with trees, rocks and rivers. 

The idea was to use the actual landscape, which not only makes it look more believable, it makes it more expansive, more epic – it looks as if the scenery goes on and on, beyond the frame. 

 

THIS IS ANOTHER CARTOON FOR “KIDS OF ALL AGES”, ISN’T IT?

Children will be able to relate to it easily because the characters are young. But the world they’re in and the journey they have to go through is difficult and challenging, and I think that part of it will appeal to older viewers, too.

 

LISTEN FOR THE ROARS

“The Good Dinosaur”, directed by Peter Sohn, opens in Thai cinemas on November 26.

Watch a clip of Jim Morris at youtu.be/nvXYBQ9-elU. For more clips and other details, check www.Facebook.com/WaltDisneyThailand.