Pixar’s Peter Sohn has revealed exactly why the voice cast of ‘The Good Dinosaur’ was overhauled six months ahead of the film’s release.



John Lithgow, Neil Patrick Harris, Judy Greer, and Bill Hader were all dropped from the project over the weekend with Anna Paquin, Jeffrey Wright, and Sam Elliot boarding the voice cast. Crucially as Sohn explains, it’s all because the lead role of Arlo is now being played 13-year-old Raymond Ochoa rather than the 29-year-old Lucas Neff.

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“It was all about finding a younger Arlo,” Sohn tells Yahoo Movies, “It was really about finding a boy [to play Arlo], so that we could push into that idea of him growing up and becoming a man, so the actor previous – who is a great actor – he was already a man, and so I needed to push that arc and find that compassionate kid, so that was the major kind of change.”

“Then everything else, all the other characters that supported that story came in and out and changed and evolved and through that evolution, some of those performers changed out of it.”

Above: Peter Sohn

The trio of Arlo’s siblings that were due to be voiced by Patrick Harris, Greer, and Hader have now been amalgamated into one character – a brother named Buck, now voiced by Marcus Scribner.

Sohn was promoted to sole director on ‘The Good Dinosaur’ in 2013 after the film’s original director Bob Petersen left the project due to story problems, and the film has since been completely revised. ‘Toy Story’ and ‘Ratatouille’ also suffered similar production woes, with huge swathes of the original ideas being thrown out in favour of better ones and Sohn assures us its all “part of the process”.

Here’s the rest of our exclusive interview with ‘The Good Dinosaur’ director Peter Sohn.

You talked about wanting to make this film so it transcends language barriers, so have you tried to make this like a silent movie?

Peter Sohn: Yes, absolutely. There’s not a lot of dialogue in the film, and we’re trying to create a tone that is – I wouldn’t say quieter – but in that sincere way that ‘Bambi’ and ‘Dumbo’ are. Like those early films where a gesture can mean everything, where certain behaviours can mean more than words could ever and in my years in animation, hunting for these gestures, hunting for these little details that can speak volumes, that’s been a great inspiration.

Are we going to see extended silent periods like in ‘Up’ and ‘Wall-E’?

PS: Yes, absolutely. There are moments in the film where Arlo’s just dealing with nature and it’s been really exciting trying it out like that, because for me, I love movies, and I love being enveloped in something and really immersed. There’s a lot of orchestration to get that going. Sometimes I can really mess up something but I’ve been getting a lot of help in terms of balancing all these things.

You see these things over and over again and it’s always finding that balance of pulling the audience in and not raising any flags that pull the audience out. It’s been amazing.

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