The Good Dinosaur: 22 Easter Eggs & References You Probably Missed
6. The Director's Deeply Personal Easter Egg
As some fans will have seen before the film (in a 30 second mini-feature from the director that screened ahead of the feature in some cinemas), Pete Sohn based the dynamic between Arlo and Spot on his own relationship with his mother. She was Korean and didn't speak any English, so they communicated with body language, as Arlo and Spot do. That same sort of wordless communication was also on show in Sohn's previous short Partly Cloudy, and he has been very open about how much it impacted his work on The Good Dinosaur:
"... suspect its a theme within me, when it comes to language. Ive talked to some people about the immigrant life of growing up in a place where I have to grow up learning English and my parents do not and trying to find ways to communicate through that. Thats definitely part of the reason I went into animation, because of that gestural and image-driven storytelling. In terms of this movie, thats one of my favorite things. Its a story of a boy and his dog, so what are those human moments that connect the two? What is that empathy that lies in there? I find it with my own dog. With these dog, we keep finding out that he can be a little bit more. Its definitely there, though..."
