Pixar’s “The Good Dinosaur” has lived in the shadow of the studio’s “Inside Out” this awards season, but the prehistoric adventure is still one of the year’s most notable animated films.
And without making a big deal out of it, the film takes an enormous visual leap from previous animated films. Using twice as many visual effects as any previous Pixar movie, the film has an unprecedented and startling level of detail and realism in its richly rendered environment, including the first volumetric clouds Pixar has ever created.
“Nature was something we wanted to push as a character in the film,” director Peter Sohn told TheWrap’s Beatrice Verhoeven. “We’ve treated nature in this very visceral way, almost like an antagonist where it’s both beautiful and scary at the same time.”
This clip, premiering exclusively at TheWrap, is a collection of moments from the film, which deals with a young dinosaur, Arlo, who is separated from his family and encounters a human child in the wilds of prehistoric Wyoming. (The premise of “The Good Dinosaur” is that the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs actually missed the earth, allowing dinos to evolve and co-exist with humans.)
Set to music by Mychael Danna and Jeff Danna that conjures up some of the feel of classic Western scores, the clip shows moments from the dinosaur’s journey through a landscape that was created after Pixar artists took research trips to the Pacific Northwest and used data from the U.S. Geological Survey to create a prehistoric Wyoming.
“We put a lot of attention,” said Sohn, “into creating a world that supports Arlo’s journey.”
Watch the video above.