Pixar 'mascot' adapts for directorial debut

The Good Dinosaur

Apart from famously loud-shirted chief executive John Lasseter, the Pixar bunch remains mostly unseen, staying behind the scenes and letting their work do their talking. An exception is Peter Sohn, who is making his directorial debut with the new animated blockbuster The Good Dinosaur, in theatres on December 31.

A beloved Pixar employee who has worked in a variety of creative roles since joining the company in 2000, Sohn has a unique on-screen presence in the Pixar cinematic universe - he was the inspiration for Russell (the kid) in 2009's Up and he voiced the fanboyish Squishy ("Hi Sully!") in 2013's Monsters University.

TimeOut is at Pixar Animation Studios in Emeryville, California, to discuss The Good Dinosaur with Sohn, and is struck by how accurately Sohn's on-screen avatars capture the cherubic Asian American's boundless enthusiasm and boyish spirit. Has his role as Pixar's unofficial mascot changed Sohn's relationship to the work?

"I don't know if it's changed anything," Sohn says. "My whole philosophy has been to try and make the best thing that I can. That's what all the directors here have done, and it's what they continue to do as directors and executives so that philosophy has never changed."

Set in a world where the dinosaurs never went extinct, Sohn describes his film as "the story of a boy and his dog, only the boy is a dinosaur [an apatosaurus named Arlo] and the dog is a boy [a feral little nipper named, appropriately enough, Spot]". When Arlo becomes separated from his farming family, he teams up with Spot to navigate the unforgiving wilderness and find a way home.

Although Arlo, Spot and the film's other characters (including a T-Rex voiced by Anna Paquin) have something of a cartoon-ish, stylised look, the world around them is pretty much photo real, stunningly so. It creates a notable contrast between the characters and their backgrounds.

"It's a really interesting challenge because you could make the dinosaur realistic," says Sohn. "But we were trying to find the boy in that character so that when he does get thrown out into the wilderness you feel like he could die, that he might not survive out there."

Sohn and his team conducted real-world research throughout the American northwest.

"When we were out there, everywhere we went, we would discover it was gorgeous and really dangerous at the same time. That duality really inspired me. Holy cow - a kid trying to survive out there, you would really need to feel that threat, large and small. You could get your foot stuck or you could get killed by an avalanche. ... we really wanted nature itself to become an emotional obstacle for Arlo. We tried graphic trees, blocky trees, but it somehow watered down the threat."

Although Sohn takes ownership of The Good Dinosaur and is the sole credited director, the project didn't originate with him.

"Early early on, around 2009, the original director on this thing, Bob Peterson [Up] asked me to come help develop this project, and in developing it, one of the first things that sparked us was this drawing I did of a long-necked dinosaur with his head in the ground. It wasn't any particular character, just the idea of this dinosaur ploughing the earth, moving this tonnage and it was inspiring in terms of 'oh, this dinosaur can be a farm machine all by itself'. There was something about that that started to trigger us. After a year or so, Bob asked me to co-direct with him and I was so thankful. He taught me so much, and in building the story, there were a couple of storylines that were just really difficult to find a solution to."

Those difficulties led to the Pixar powers-that-be, in the name of serving story above all things, deciding to change directors during the development process because they weren't satisfied with how the film was coming together.

"From there it was just like, 'You know what, let's simplify this'," Sohn continues. "And they asked me to do it [take over as director]. I had been on the project, I had seen ways that didn't work, so I had some degree of history with it but at the same time this was my first time doing something like this. I had confidence in certain aspects of film-making here, only because I'd worked in a lot of departments, and then there was a whole side that I didn't know. The directors here were very supportive in a way that makes me very emotional."

Lowdown

What: The Good Dinosaur

When and Where: In theatres on December 31.