SlashFilm:
The environments in The Good Dinosaur are breathtaking. There are moments in the 30 minutes of the movie I previewed that look no different from live-action footage. And if it looks real, that might be because they used real data to create the locations in the film.
Some shots in the movie look out more than 50 miles in the distance. To accomplish this near-impossible task, the set team used actual USGS data of the northwest United States to create the sets in the film.
The amount of work that goes into any animated film today is mind-boggling but Pixar go so far beyond what anyone else does for the look of their films. As the story says, they wanted the environment to be another character in the story.
I had to laugh when I got to this part: “I was expecting to hear a lot about the research that went into the prehistoric period and how what they learned about dinosaurs influenced the story and flavor of the film. Surprisingly, there was little mention of history or even the dinosaur species that are at the core of the story.”
I immediately forwarded the link to my wife, who gets almost apoplectic that they have a human and a dinosaur interacting with each other – in a kid’s show no less – when, in reality, they were separated by millions of years. She finds this to be a terrible mischaracterization of history, and likely to further the erroneous impression that dinosaurs and “cavemen” lived around the same time.
Then I got to the part where the author said: “the story takes place in a universe where dinosaurs weren’t killed off by an astroid hitting Earth”. Problem solved?