SNAPSHOT
The Good Dinosaur asks the question: What if the asteroid that forever changed life on Earth missed the planet completely and giant dinosaurs never became extinct? Pixar Animation Studios takes you on an epic journey into the world of dinosaurs where an Apatosaurus named Arlo makes an unlikely human friend. While traveling through a harsh and mysterious landscape, Arlo learns the power of confronting his fears and discovers what he is truly capable of. (synopsis via Pixar wikia)
I have long been a fan of alternate histories.
What if Hitler had lived? What if aliens had invaded in World War Two? (There really is a series with this as its premise by one of the masters of the genre, Harry Turtledove, and it’s a brilliant exploration of geopolitics, power and human venality.) What if the South had won the Civil War? Etc etc etc and on it goes.
The possibilities are endless.
Just how endless has been underlined most beautifully by Pixar who have travelled back 65 million years in a bid to ponder what life might have been like had that pesky dinosaur-squashing meteor simply skipped by our delightful blue planet rather than hitting it dead on and ending the dinosaur’s long running reign.
The result of all that creative pondering is The Good Dinosaur, Pixar’s upcoming second original story feature film for 2015, directed by Peter Sohn (Partly Cloudy, a Pixar short) where dinosaurs have kept evolving, developing a advanced society of their own, one which shares real estate with a mammal on the rise, Homo Sapiens.
What happens when dinosaur and man, or rather cave-boy, come face to face with each other is the centre of what promises to be another remarkably insightful, beautifully constructed animation feature from the masters of modern storytelling.
The teaser trailer admittedly doesn’t give away too much but it has enough wit and whimsy in its short running time to make you believe this will be as much of a treat as the impending arrival of the very positively reviewed Inside Out.
The Good Dinosaur opens in USA on 25 November 2015 and Australia on 26 December.