Dragon Heart

Disney is reimagining a '70s fave with extra soul and state of the art FX. Tara Bennett meets Pete's Dragon.

- Tara Bennett

Some say the ’70s was Disney’s forgotten decade, overshadowed by the golden eras either side of it. But the House of Mouse had a prolific, inventive run of movies back then, from ambitious SF epic The Black Hole to a live-action musical featuring an animated dragon...

While Pete’s Dragon was a modest success at the time, it never received the critical acclaim that met Mary Poppins, another live action-animated hybrid. Nor does it have the cross-generational nostalgia of that Julie Andrews classic. So in 2010 Disney targeted this boy-and-his-dragon tale as part of the back-catalogue that might be ripe for reinvention. They stripped the musical aspect from its DNA and asked writers to pitch them new takes. Indie director/writer David Lowery, best known for Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, was one who heeded the call.

A long-time Disney fan, Lowery tells SFX he saw the original film when he was six – but he hasn’t re-watched it, even to this day. “It’s not one of the crown jewels of their library,” Lowery says of the 1977 version. “It’s beloved by many people, but it’s not so beloved that you can’t take it and run. I saw it as an opportunity to tell a new story.”

The producers agreed. “The mandate from the studio was, ‘We want to make a movie called Pete’s Dragon. It has to have a boy named Pete in it… and a dragon. That’s it. They had been thinking about it for a while, but they didn’t have a goal to have it in theatres by 2016. They were more of the opinion that if the right story came along, and the right storytelling, it would be worth doing.”