How Pixar Changed All The Rules To Make The Good Dinosaur A Stunning Masterpiece

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io9.com – Charlie Jane Anders

Pixar’s new movie The Good Dinosaur takes place in a bizarre alternate history—what if the dinosaurs weren’t wiped out 65 million years ago? But the process of making this wild, ambitious film required a very different counterfactual: What if the way animators create scenery and characters had been turned on its head?

Even for a studio known for taking risks and breaking new ground, The Good Dinosaur is an odd duck. And the more you learn about it, the stranger it appears. We spent a day and a half at Pixar’s campus in Emeryville, CA with a group of other reporters from online outlets, and we saw a big chunk of the film. And director Peter Sohn and his whole crew explained to us how they threw out the rulebook to make The Good Dinosaur, and basically came up with a whole different way of creating a world.

We sampled the first half of The Good Dinosaur

We had already seen a lot of footage from The Good Dinosaur at Disney’s D23 event back in August. But the half hour or so that we saw last week was the biggest sizzle-reel that anybody outside Pixar has seen. And it had the final music, sound and other effects, which made a big difference. And in answer to your first question, yes, The Good Dinosaur will make you cry.

In a nutshell, we learned that Arlo, an apatosaurus, lives on a farm with his parents and two siblings, where Arlo has a hard time fitting in with the rest of the family. But then Arlo’s father is killed, and soon afterwards, Arlo himself falls into a swift river and is carried hundreds of miles away from home, in a crazy kinetic sequence that conveys the feeling of not knowing which way is up. Arlo winds up in a strange landscape, where he struggles to climb and get food despite his lack of opposable digits—there is a lot of four-legged slapstick in this film—and then he meets a human boy, who brings him food and seems friendly.

The human boy has basically the intelligence of a smart dog, and can’t speak, unlike Arlo. And Arlo has no interest in acquiring a human pet, so he keeps trying to shoo this unruly beast. But the boy keeps coming back, and turns out to be incredibly useful to Arlo (because hey, opposable digits. And climbing.) When another dinosaur, a styracosaurus who collects other creatures as symbiotic pets, tries to claim the human, Arlo fights to keep him. And whoever names the boy gets to keep him, so Arlo finally gives him a name he’ll answer to: Spot.

Then Arlo and Spot bond over their shared sense of loss—Spot has lost his entire family. Spot howls at the moon in sorrow, and Arlo finally joins in.

There are also some pretty hilarious sequences where Arlo and Spot mess with some irate gophers who keep getting pushed out whenever Arlo and Spot blow into their holes. And Arlo and Spot catch fireflies, too.

We also saw a huge chunk of a sequence where Arlo and Spot team up with a family of T-rexes, who are basically cattle ranchers and act like cowboys. The T-rexes have lost their herd of buffalo, and they enlist Arlo’s help to track them down and then flush out the cattle thieves who stole them.

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog