'The Good Dinosaur:' Lasseter Talks Footage, Composer

Yesterday, John Lasseter revealed much anticipated information about several of Pixar's upcoming films, including November 2015's The Good Dinosaur. More information, however, has since been revealed regarding footage that was revealed during his presentation. Additionally, Lasseter revealed The Good Dinosaur's newly appointed composer, Mychael Danna, whose previous work includes Academy Award-winning Life of Pi, among many other films. Find out what the footage revealed from The Good Dinosaur showed off, as well as more comments by Pixar Chief Creative Officer John Lasseter on the film all after the break!

Segments from GamesRadar's article on the footage revealed by Lasseter:

Lasseter described 2015 as a “milestone year” for Pixar, the first in the studio’s history where they would be releasing two movies – Inside Out and The Good Dinosaur and the biggest chunk of his presentation was devoted to the latter. All of Pixar’s films ask questions: what if toys came to life when you weren’t around? What if monsters were real? But The Good Dinosaur asks the biggest question of all, Lasseter said: what if the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs missed Earth?

A lot of the footage that Lasseter showed was still a work in progress, but it was already plain to see that The Good Dinosaur will be among Pixar’s most visually accomplished films to date. Footage of water falling on leaves, vast foliage-filled mountainsides and geysers spewing steaming water looked so real we assumed it was research material until Lasseter clarified it had all been created in a computer.

Main dino Arlo has a more stylised look. He’s a leaf-green Apatosaurus and utterly charming, appearing slightly awkward in his own body, and moving like he hasn’t quite grasped how to operate his own limbs properly yet. In The Good Dinosaur’s world herbivores are farmers, and at the start of the film Arlo’s father Henry is killed in a tragic accident. Shortly after Arlo falls into some rapids and is knocked unconscious (the water looked astonishing in this sequence, as life-like as water has looked on screen), finding himself hundreds of miles from home.

In the wilderness Arlo meets Spot – a tiny human boy who’s more canine than homo sapien, walking on all fours, crying like a wolf and not speaking a word (Arlo on the other hand is voiced with youthful exuberance by Lucas Neff). Lasseter described the film as a “boy and dog story, but the roles are reversed” and together the two set out to find Arlo’s home. We were shown a sequence where Arlo tries to explain what family is and that his father died to Spot using twigs in the sand – a genuinely touching moment despite the fact this was the first proper bit of footage we were seeing of these characters.

Other highlights included velociraptors with feathers that look like haircuts, a triceratops with animals living on his horns who acts as a sort of spiritual guide for Arlo, pterodactyls (which are the vultures of The Good Dinosaur’s world), square-jawed T-Rexes (who aren’t all that bad) and a beautiful sequence in a field where Arlo stirs up some fireflies with his tail, much to Spot’s delight.

The idea that Pixar is going above and beyond on the visual front for The Good Dinosaur is very exciting. Pixar's 2012 release, Brave, pushed the visual effects that the studio could accomplish in terms of human characteristics and ancient scenery/environments. But The Good Dinosaur looks to further progress what the studio can accomplish in mimicking reality- making the water effects more realistic than modern cg effects have ever accomplished on film, environments and foliage so realistic that the footage looks as if it were taken during a research trip. The visual foundation that is being created for The Good Dinosaur is not only just for the benefit of this one film. Like with all of Pixar's releases, the accomplishments made with each feature in the effects department bleed into the foundations for all of their future films, building off of one another to progress visual effects beyond the imaginable. And The Good Dinosaur looks to be taking one giant step forward for the studio, not that other films haven't, but that the film looks to take on more than any other has in the studio's history (aside from computer-animation's conception and fulfillment with Toy Story). The Good Dinosaur comes to theaters on November 25th, 2015!