Pete's Dragon

David Lowery remade a 1977 Disney musical without the songs, and moved it out of early twentieth century New England into the American northwest coast of the early 1980s. The fur was Lowery’s idea. He has said he was thinking about his own cats, wanted a dragon you would want to hug, and that nothing says dragons cannot be furry. Weta Digital built Elliot with 20 million hairs. His flight was worked out from the Pegasus sequence in Fantasia and footage of a polar bear swimming underwater, while an arctic fox supplied the reference for how he jumps and splashes. It was shot in New Zealand: Wellington, Rotorua and the area around Tapanui, where an old lumber mill became the mill in the story and the main street was turned into Millhaven for two weeks. Howard Shore was hired to score the film and was replaced during post production by Daniel Hart, who had worked with Lowery before. None of the original songs appear on screen, though Candle on the Water was re-recorded for the album. A good fit if you want the dragon treated as a playmate rather than a set piece, with the boy’s loss ranked above pace. Not for anyone after the songs and the hand drawn animation of the 1977 version.