So John Lasseter, the studio’s chief creative officer, took the drastic step of putting the film on pause – and, after a period of frenzied rewriting and brainstorming, replacing its original director, the Pixar veteran Bob Peterson, with his then-35-year-old deputy Peter Sohn.Īt that stage Sohn had only one directing credit to his name: the short film Partly Cloudy, that played in cinemas in 2009 before Pixar’s Up. But the storyline, in which a young Apatosaurus called Arlo strikes up an unlikely friendship with a feral homo sapiens called Spot, had become increasingly tangled.Įxtraneous characters and story twists and turns had crept in during the development process, and the film was stretching in too many directions at once, tying its 30-foot necks in knots. The central concept – what if the asteroid that brought about the dinosaurs’ extinction on Earth had missed? – was solid. The studio’s 15th feature, The Good Dinosaur, had been in production for four years, but despite the best efforts of its hundred-strong crew, progress had ground to a halt. A little under two years ago, Pixar Animation Studios started fighting to save their Dinosaur from extinction.

The good dinosaur pixar intro