When news first emerged last summer that Pixar’s next effort, The Good Dinosaur, was going to switch directors and take an 18-month delay from May 2014 to November 2015, it sounded like the project might go extinct. But in a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, replacement director Peter Sohn recently spoke about the film’s progress and the changes that needed to be made. Turns out, The Good Dinosaur hasn’t changed its mosquito- derived DNA too dramatically from Bob Peterson’s original vision.
“It’s always been about this young dinosaur growing up. But the world itself has changed a lot. Nature has become a character,” Sohn shared.
Unintentionally, though, The Good Dinosaur takes two pages from Interstellar—a denial of history and an adversary in nature. As Peterson originally envisioned, the film still takes place in a world where an asteroid never hit the Earth and the dinosaurs never went extinct, but instead of a focus on an agrarian society of dinosaurs, there will be a much greater emphasis on the savagery of nature and inclement weather.
The film will focus Arlo, a teenage Apatosaurus (the species from Jurassic Park that overzealous paleontologists angrily correct when you call it a Brontosaurus) who mistakenly takes a young boy named Spot as a pet when he assumes he’s a beetle. Together, they will almost certainly become lifelong friends and go on adorable adventures.
The Good Dinosaur is far from the first time that a director has been replaced on a Pixar project. Most recently, 2012’s Brave acrimoniously lost its director, Brenda Chapman, who accused Pixar of being a “boys club.” That switch had creative ripples for the film, as it transitioned from a dark “feminist fairy tale” of a mother and daughter to the broader and more typical adventure story it became.
But Chapman is perhaps the exception, as Ratatouille, Toy Story 2, and Cars 2 all similarly saw mid-production creative switch-ups before getting back on their feet. Sohn previously worked on Brad Bird’s heart-melting The Iron Giant, directed the Pixar short Partly Cloudy, and was the real-life inspiration for the unfailingly enthusiastic Russell from Pixar’s Up, so it would at least appear that the film is in capable hands.
The Good Dinosaur will stomp into theaters (and presumably into our hearts) on November 25, 2015.