'Good Dinosaur' goes wild, wild West

Disney/Pixar’s latest animated film finds a home on the range, though instead of the deer and the antelope, it’s where a caveboy and an Apatosaurus play.

The Good Dinosaur (in theaters Wednesday) weaves the influence of the Western movie genre with frontier landscapes in its coming-of-age twist on the boy-and-his-dog story while also emphasizing the importance of family and friendship — including a trio of Tyrannosaurus rexes infused with the cowboy way.

“This stands a chance of really hitting home for a lot of people. It is family fare, and being a father, it spoke to me,” says Sam Elliott, who voices the T. rex dad Butch, a no-nonsense character integral to helping 11-year-old dino Arlo (Raymond Ochoa) get home through the treacherous wilderness alongside his little human pal Spot (Jack Bright).

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That survival aspect is key, too, Elliott adds. “One of the classic elements in the Western genre, which I’ve done a lot of over the years, is man’s struggle. More specifically, it’s man’s struggle with himself, man against man, man against the environment.”

The Good Dinosaur imagines a world where an asteroid didn’t hit Earth 65 million years ago and wipe out the large reptiles that roamed the planet. Fast-forward millions of years, and Arlo is part of an Apatosaur clan of farmers getting ready for a harsh winter. A great storm strikes, taking the life of Arlo’s father (Jeffrey Wright), and later the youngster gets separated from his family, needing the help of the ferociously loyal Spot to find his way back while coming face to face with his own fears.

The idea of creating a movie where the wildest frontier imaginable was one before civilization “jazzed a whole bunch of us,” says Good Dinosaur director Peter Sohn, a former story artist on Pixar hits Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Ratatouille and WALL-E.

“You could have had them going anywhere,” producer Denise Ream adds about the dinosaur characters. “They could have been driving cars in cities. But I loved that we kept it in nature. In some ways, that was unexpected.”

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Getting the movie made was a pleasant surprise in itself. An earlier version of the film with director Bob Peterson and a largely different voice cast on board was scrapped two years ago because of story problems, which was “pretty painful,” Ream acknowledges.

The delay also meant shifting the movie's release until this year, the rare one with two Pixar films. June release Inside Out made more than $356 million, but the Thanksgiving release of The Good Dinosaur is also fortuitous for the studio: It's the last big family film of 2015 and likely will have solid numbers through the end of the year, according to Rentrak senior media analyst Paul Dergarabedian. "Pixar is a brand that carries a lot of weight with kids and families," he says. "We will see, after a long hiatus, a Pixar film that will once again make its mark over this extended holiday."

When The Good Dinosaur restarted with Sohn in the director's chair (he had been co-director before the shutdown), Ream wanted the filmmaker to use a research trip to the Northwest “to clear his mind and just have a chance to reset,” she says. But the visit to Wyoming, Idaho and Oregon ended up having a huge influence on the setting — since, from a paleontological perspective, dinosaur bones have been found in those areas — and certain cinematic elements.

Early takes were too Western, with saloons and sheriffs where “we went almost to a parody,” Sohn says. “It just felt like we were making fun of a genre and there wasn’t anything sincere about it.”

Instead he leaned into the vibe of frontier movies he grew up watching, such as 1972's Jeremiah Johnson. Robert Redford’s mountain man surviving on his own was an inspiration for what would happen to Arlo, contrasting “the small things that could really hurt you, like getting your foot stuck under a rock, vs. the big ones" like a giant swarm of bees, Sohn says.

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The 1957 Disney film Old Yeller spoke to him as well, plus real Northwest families Sohn talked with who reflected a universal theme: Every member had to help out for the group to succeed and make a living.

Sohn connected to that, seeing how his own New York City childhood was spent helping his Korean immigrant parents run their grocery store. “There’s nothing really Western about that other than we were a family trying to survive in the city,” he says. “We all worked together trying to make this thing go.”

The rough-and-tumble world of The Good Dinosaur came to life through animating a lot of what the filmmakers saw in places such as the Montana grasslands and Wyoming’s Snake River and Teton mountain ranges. Yet the Western motif found its way into its various critters, too, big and small.

Raptor “rustlers” are feathered and ferocious animals with twangy accents and a tendency to go after longhorn cattle, and Good Dinosaur’s resident outlaws are a gang of bullying Pterodactyls led by Thunderclap (Steve Zahn), who pick on Arlo and tell him that being scared is for losers.

“He doesn’t want to be the person who’s a scaredy-cat,” Sohn says. “It solidified Arlo’s journey: Once he beats them, he could understand he could get through his fears.”

The most surprising good guys of The Good Dinosaur are the trio of T. rexes, Butch and his kids Nash (A.J. Buckley) and Ramsey (Anna Paquin). While they’re the fearsome antagonists of the Jurassic Park franchise and most films of its ilk, “in this movie, we’re just this cool little family that barbecues at night and reins in the cattle in the morning,” Buckley says.

They gallop like horses — because, Sohn says, “they would need to move at a certain rate to move these cattle”  — yet they evolved from being clichéd cowhands to “a more truthful, more authentic kind of ranch family” after the filmmaker met the McKay rancher clan during his trip to Oregon. “They would really change a lot of my feelings toward everything,” he says.

The T. rexes are part of one of the most significant scenes in the movie, at least for Arlo: Around a campfire, Butch tells him and Spot about how he got the huge scar on the side of his mouth from battling some killer crocodiles. “If you ain’t afraid of a croc biting you in the face,” Butch regales, “you ain’t alive.”

“I’m a dad and I’ve been through that,” Elliott says. “He’s hard-nosed and old-school in some way … and the fact that he’s a storyteller, that certainly speaks to me.”

To Arlo, these guys are the toughest characters he’s ever met, but it means a lot when they tell him being scared is natural, Sohn says. “That became something emotional and also something connected to the research with the family we met.”

“Keep the West alive” has become a catchphrase of sorts nowadays, Elliott says. He grew up at a time when kids played cowboys and Indians, and even though it’s a much more modern frontier today, Elliott sees The Good Dinosaur as a chance to pass a love for that material on to a younger generation.

“It speaks to a lot of people,” he says. “It’s kind of where we all came from.”