“I remember as a kid feeling the goose bumps of, ‘There are so many people out there! This is real!’” Sohn says in a later interview. “How do we capture this? What did they do to give you that feeling of scope and of the land?”

SEE ALSO: Pixar president Jim Morris discusses The Good Dinosaur

Sohn’s artistic ambition and boyish enthusiasm are palpable, but the rocky production of The Good Dinosaur tested another, more grown-up quality in the Bronx-born, Korean-American animator – his ability to lead.

Pixar executives removed The Good Dinosaur’s previous director, Bob Peterson, in the summer of 2013 over story concerns, and elevated Sohn. Though he had distinguished himself in the art, story and animation departments at Pixar, and directed the 2009 short film Partly Cloudy, Sohn had never directed a feature, and was taking over responsibility for a frustrated crew of hundreds grappling with a story that had grown increasingly complex.

“Pete had a reputation at Pixar as someone who is super talented,” says Good Dinosaur producer Denise Ream. “He has an incredible eye. He’s funny, he’s emotional, he’s honest, he has a lot of charisma. But when he was named director, people kept saying, ‘Can he do it?’”

Midstream director changes happen more often in animation than live action, and especially at Pixar, where an iterative creative process led to swaps on Ratatouille, Cars 2 and Brave. The Good Dinosaur screenplay is credited to Meg LeFauve but the film has four other writing credits, including Sohn, Peterson, Erik Benson and Kelsey Mann.

Ironically the key change Sohn says he made to the story was to return to Peterson’s own simple, original pitch, a twist on the boy-and-his-dog story, which had been subsumed by several subplots about exotic human and dinosaur civilisations.

In The Good Dinosaur, Sohn juxtaposes two unique styles of animation, his characters designed with a cartoonish whimsy and his settings treated with a painterly realism. The western-inspired movie follows an 11-year-old apatosaurus named Arlo who befriends a scruffy human boy named Spot, with Spot serving as Arlo’s scratching, fetching companion on a dangerous voyage into the wilderness.

Sohn’s parents emigrated from Korea in the 1970s, opening two grocery. From his father he got a driven work ethic, from his mother a love of art and cinema, Sohn says. (Last summer at D23, Disney’s fan convention, while other animation directors presented footage from their films, Sohn showed a reel of storyboards he had made about his mother, who loved Disney movies because she could understand them despite her limited English skills).

“My mother and I are a lot alike,” Sohn says. “She’s hot-tempered. Her emotions are on her sleeve just like mine. She wanted to be an artist when she was growing up in Korea, but she was a woman … the last of four daughters before a son was born. My uncle was going to be the one to go to college. She took us to the movies all the time. I owe her everything. I owe her the art love and the movie love. In a weird Korean way she knows movies better than I do.”

Sohn started attending his uncle’s SAT-prep school in sixth grade, but his mind wandered and he spent classes doodling.

“I remember my mom sitting me down and saying, ‘You have to focus,’” Sohn says. “‘This is not going to be your future.’ She must have heard the same thing when she was younger.”

Sohn was accepted into the prestigious character animation programme at the California Institute of the Arts, and while studying there got a summer job working on Brad Bird’s 1999 animated cult classic The Iron Giant. His career soon blossomed, with a stop at Warner Bros. Animation before landing at Pixar in 2000.

“In New York it was always about, ‘I’m yellow. This is my identity,’” Sohn says. “When I found animation, that was my new tribe.”

At Pixar, Sohn quickly became a studio character – literally. His round, expressive face was an inspiration for Russell, the overenthusiastic 8-year-old wilderness explorer in Up.

Sohn had been working on The Good Dinosaur as Peterson’s co-director, a title akin to a deputy at Pixar, when the studio leadership grew anxious over Peterson’s failure to make key story decisions as the release date barrelled down on him. (Peterson declined to comment for this story.)

After changing directors, the studio pushed back the release date of the film by 18 months, a dramatic move that left Pixar without a feature film out in 2014. Denise Ream used the extra time to surround Sohn with experienced department heads, including production designer Harley Jessup and director of photography Sharon Calahan, so he could focus on honing the story.

“When big changes happen, it hurts,” Sohn says. “I was very transparent, as much as I could be. There were a lot of areas where I felt confident but there were some where I just didn’t. I had no experience in the technical departments. I said, ‘I’m going to be honest with everyone about the things I don’t know.’ There was no time to second-guess.”

Sohn and key members of his crew took a research trip inspired by one his favourite films, the 1953 western Shane, which was shot in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. During that trip, to the Wyoming side of the Teton mountain range, the filmmakers decided nature would be Arlo’s adversary.

Capturing nature’s ferocity and beauty meant creating several technically challenging action sequences on a roiling river, as well as more contemplative shots of dancing fireflies and quivering pine trees. For an animated movie, the sheer number of locations and the vastness Sohn wanted to convey were daunting.

“After the Wyoming trip, he came back with a vision and decisiveness that gave me huge confidence,” Ream says. “Morale kept getting better and better as the story was falling into place. People loved Pete’s honesty. It got to the point where that crew would do anything for him.”

At the same time, Sohn wanted to preserve a wit and warmth to his characters, a varied mix that includes a macho rancher tyrannosaurus named Butch, voiced by Sam Elliott, and a wacky styracosaurus, voiced by Sohn.

“When I got on board I wanted to say, ‘Is there any way we can do this without another monster attack, without another carnivore? Is there any way we can make it emotional?’” Sohn says. “All the guides we talked to [in Wyoming] said that nature was the most beautiful and the most dangerous thing you could encounter. That duality was everywhere.”

Los Angeles Times

The Good Dinosaur opens on February 4