Pixar’s first real box-office disappointment, 2015’s The Good Dinosaur also highlighted the occasional downside to the studio’s storytelling process. Pixar looked unassailable in the summer of 2015. It had just released Inside Out, which in time would gross over $850m and win an Oscar for Best Animated Feature. That year was also the 20th anniversary ... The Good Dinosaur, and the Pixar that film time forgot
Pixar’s first real box-office disappointment, 2015’s The Good Dinosaur also highlighted the occasional downside to the studio’s storytelling process.
Pixar looked unassailable in the summer of 2015. It had just released Inside Out, which in time would gross over $850m and win an Oscar for Best Animated Feature. That year was also the 20th anniversary of Pixar’s feature debut Toy Story – the film that proved to the world that an entirely CG-animated movie was not only technically possible, but could also attract an audience.
Scheduled for release roughly six months after Inside Out, The Good Dinosaur was Pixar’s second feature film of 2015. In theory, it sounded like the logical counter-point to director Pete Docter’s earlier film: where Inside Out was an interior, emotional coming-of-age comedy drama, The Good Dinosaur was widescreen and exterior – a western and survival adventure. Its deployment of giant, toothsome lizards, meanwhile, was intended to tap into a similar market that made John Lasseter’s Cars a merchandising bonanza in 2006.
Behind the scenes, Pixar appeared to be nervous about The Good Dinosaur. Subjected to multiple delays, the departure of its original director, a comprehensive rewrite of its script and the replacement of multiple voice actors, its difficult production had been extensively covered in the Hollywood press.
In a bid to reclaim the narrative, Disney/Pixar flew out a number of journalists to the company’s HQ in October 2015, including the humble writer typing these words. The plan appeared to be to focus on the film’s achievements – not least its almost photo-real environments – and downplay the problems which led to the redundancy of some 50 staff the previous year.
Inadvertently, that press tour also provided a small insight into The Good Dinosaur’s troubled path to the screen – and, perhaps, the limits of an iterative storytelling approach that had previously resulted in such classics as A Bug’s Life, Finding Nemo and Up.
The first signs of trouble emerged in 2013. By then, it was a full four years into development, based on an idea by animator Bob Peterson: what if the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs had missed Earth entirely? Peterson came up with a kind of comedy western set in an alternate USA where humans are feral and dinosaurs have formed peaceful agrarian communities.
Originally, Pixar had intended The Good Dinosaur to come out in November 2013, but in 2012, it was announced that the feature was to be pushed back to 2014, with Disney’s Frozen taking Pixar’s original spot. The problem was rooted in the script: Peterson and his team had a premise and some characters – apatosaurus protagonist Arlo and his human sidekick, Spot – but no third act.
In May 2013, it was announced that Bob Peterson had been taken off the film entirely, and that Peter Sohn (who previously made the short, Partly Cloudy) would take over as director. Producer John Walker left at the same time, with Denise Ream (Up, Cars 2) taking over the reins. “The story was not working, period, full stop,” Ream told Collider in 2015. “It was just not where it needed to be.”
Under the direction of Sohn and Ream, The Good Dinosaur was extensively retooled over the next two years – so much so that much of the previously-announced voice cast were replaced. At one stage, the line-up of celebrity voices included John Lithgow, Frances McDormand, Judie Greer and Bill Hader; by June 2015, the only survivor of the cull was Frances McDormand.
According to John Lithgow, who was replaced by Jeffrey Wright as Arlo’s father, Poppa Henry, the story had been “completely reimagined.”
As originally conceived, The Good Dinosaur was said to be more like a traditional western, and about a community of sauropod farmers. Little has been disclosed about the earlier versions of the script; it seems that it was always intended to be a survival story of some sort, with Arlo and Spot bonding as they battle against storms and floods. But Arlo was originally designed to be a much older, larger character; in the finished film, he’s essentially an 11 year-old boy (voiced by Raymond Ochoa).
“It was a challenge in the beginning,” Peter Sohn told me in 2015. “We had a more adult Arlo when we first began – he had really textured skin; he had really structural shapes to him. And we lost that sense of youth to him. I definitely wanted to find that boy quality.”
Elsewhere, the filmmaking team at Pixar were more intent on talking about The Good Dinosaur’s technical accomplishments – which were admittedly dazzling. Although Arlo himself is loose-limbed and cartoonish, the environments around him are extraordinarily detailed: clouds, rock surfaces and water simulations were far closer to photo-realism than anything Pixar had produced before.
During my visit to Pixar’s huge, pristine headquarters in Emeryville, California, the company staged several talks about The Good Dinosaur’s environment design, effects and lighting. There was a lengthy presentation, with accompanying video footage, of a research trip to Montana, where the artists immersed themselves in the natural world they wanted to capture in their film. On a technical level, the ambition behind The Good Dinosaur was evidently considerable.
What was more curious was Pixar’s reluctance to show too much of the film itself. Although the feature was about six weeks away from release, we were told that it wasn’t deemed finished enough to be shown in full, so journalists were only allowed to watch a handful of disjointed scenes which amounted to roughly 30 minutes.
Again, it looked beautiful. We were shown a sequence where Arlo tumbles into a ravine and is dragged downstream by an aggressive current. There was a quirky character moment where Arlo and Spot meet the eccentric ‘collector’ Forrest Woodbrush, voiced by Peter Sohn himself. We were also shown a more introspective scene between Arlo and Spot, where they wordlessly share their personal stories beneath a full Moon.
These were, it later turned out, the film’s most effective scenes. Although thoroughly pleasant as a brisk adventure, The Good Dinosaur would subsequently emerge as Pixar’s most lightweight film to date. Certainly, it lacked the emotional impact or thematic depth of Inside Out. For the first time, it seemed that a studio prized for balancing technical excellence with strong storytelling had favoured visuals over plot and character.
The change in director could have been singled out as the problem, but The Good Dinosaur was far from the first Pixar film to see a shift in leadership. Ratatouille, Cars 2 and Brave had all switched directors during their productions. Rather, the problem appeared to lie with nailing down what the film was meant to be about.
What began as a project with a premise but no concrete story ended that way – and even Pixar’s usual approach of constantly testing and refining its ideas couldn’t resolve the problem this time around.
During the Pixar HQ visit, we were taken to the spacious conference room where much of The Good Dinosaur was discussed and written. There, story supervisor Kelsey Mann and screenwriter Meg LeFauve talked through the iterative process that Pixar’s movies typically go through.
In the story room, Mann explained, the director, screenwriter and other personnel working on a movie gather and talk about both the project and their perspectives on life. “We talk about a lot of things in this room,” Mann said. “It’s all about exploring feelings… we talk about things like, I remember when I was eight years old and my parents got divorced.”
Along with that intimacy, which Mann compared to being like a counselling session (“directors don’t go to therapy, they make movies,” Mann said), there’s a big performance element.
When someone has an idea for a scene, it’s written down and drawn out as story boards, and then it’s physically performed to the rest of the team to see if it works. Mann demonstrated how a typical pitch like this goes: he talked through a storyboarded scene, dramatising what was in each sketch, acting out the characters’ mannerisms and providing sound effects.
“That’s part of the tradition,” Mann said afterwards, catching his breath. “It’s part of the performance – I’m trying to make you guys feel the movie. If it’s silly, I’m gonna be silly. If there’s a funny noise, I’m gonna do a funny noise. If there’s a loud noise, I’m gonna go ‘boom’… Everybody’s in the room, and I’m telling everyone what I’m envisioning the scene to be. There’s a technical advisor, there’s an editor who’s going to cut this. They’re going to grab a sound effect, so I’m gonna say, ‘Boom! Editor, please do a giant boom [sound] there.’”
Along with all that freedom and creativity, however, comes a faintly exhausting-sounding side order of construction and deconstruction.
“I’m writing drafts, and then they go make it,” Meg LeFavauve said. “But here my drafts are very fast because they have to get it up into boards, and they cut it, they edit it, take the sound, use it to it, and then we show it in that big theater to 300 people, and we get 300 sets of notes. Yeah, when they make the movie over and over and over and over. So instead of script drafts, doing a movie over and over, and every time you do the movie, you go back down to the bottom, meaning back into the core concept, and rebuild it. And rebuild…”
Even through all that rebuilding, it seemed that nobody could quite get a thematic handle on what The Good Dinosaur was about. Toy Story was about friendship and identity; Inside Out was about growing up and accepting (rather than suppressing) negative emotions like fear and sadness. The Good Dinosaur was itself a coming-of-age story, where Arlo overcomes his own fears and sense of loss on his journey back to his family, but without the same emotional payoff.
As reporter Drew Taylor told The Ringer last year, “What kills this movie is that it’s just a bunch of things running around in the woods.”
The Good Dinosaur, as likeable as it can be, was perhaps the first Pixar film that felt somewhat ordinary. Certainly, from a financial standpoint, it was the studio’s first disappointment in its 20 years of feature-making: it made $332m in cinemas – considerably less than Inside Out achieved just six months prior.
More curiously, Pixar seemed content to let everyone forget about the film in the years that followed. Following the ousting of boss John Lasseter after allegations of inappropriate conduct, the studio, under the stewardship of Peter Docter, leant increasingly on bankable sequels, including Incredibles 2, Toy Story 4 and Inside Out 2, which were all huge hits. Toy Story 5 and Coco 2 are also on the way.
In the 11 years since, Pixar has made a number of original films, too: Peter Sohn directed 2023’s Elemental, which overcame an initially bumpy start at the box-office and ended up becoming a modest success.
Other projects have had problems of their own, perhaps even more deep-seated than The Good Dinosaur’s: 2025’s Elio lost its original director, Adrian Molina, during its production, with reports alleging that his sci-fi adventure had LGBTQ+ themes that were subsequently dropped. Peter Docter, defending the film’s changes, ill-advisedly told The Wall Street Journal that, “We’re making a movie, not hundreds of millions of dollars of therapy.”
It was an ironic choice of words for more than one reason: both because of the subject of his own film, Inside Out, and because of the specific way Pixar crafts its stories, with creatives actively encouraged to share their emotions and life experiences.
Bob Peterson, who came up with The Good Dinosaur’s concept, originally wanted to tell a story that was inspired by the Amish communities where he grew up in Ohio. This was later flattened out into a more broad story about a boy and his dog – albeit with the boy being a dinosaur and the dog being a boy who scampers about on all fours.
It was a foreshadowing, perhaps, of the more fundamental flattening faced by Molina, who wanted to put his own experiences of being a gay youth into Elio, only to have that story element (allegedly) toned down.
“I was deeply saddened and aggrieved by the changes that were made,” former Pixar assistant editor Sarah Ligatich told The Hollywood Reporter last year. “The exodus of talent after that cut was really indicative of how unhappy a lot of people were that they had changed and destroyed this beautiful work.”
A studio long praised for finding the human spark in a digital artform, Pixar has increasingly found that the utopian ideal of telling personal stories can clash with the reality of being part of a multi-million dollar corporation. In its best films, Pixar’s iterative approach to storytelling creates beloved animated classics; on occasions, it can result in that human spark becoming lost in the machine.
