Trailer
Plot summary
The Gogans, an abusive farm family in early 1900s Maine, bought the orphan Pete and set him to work, so he runs away, helped by an unseen companion he calls Elliott. The next morning Elliott shows himself as a green dragon who can turn invisible. In the fishing town of Passamaquoddy, Elliott's clumsiness leaves Pete blamed for bad luck. The lighthouse keeper, Lampie, meets the boy after stumbling out of a tavern, and his tale of a dragon is taken for a drunken rant. His daughter Nora warns Pete that the tide makes his seaside cave unsafe, learns he has no family in the area, and offers him shelter at the lighthouse.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Pete's Dragon (1977)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- For Pete's Dragon, Disney built its lighthouse on the Point Buchon Trail in Montana De Oro State Park, south of Los Osos, California, standing in for Maine. The beacon was so large that Disney needed special Coast Guard permission to run it, since lighting it during filming would have confused passing ships.
- Impressed by child actor Kevin Corcoran in Old Yeller, Walt Disney had him in mind to star as Pete when the project was planned as a feature film. Disney instead judged it better suited to his Disneyland anthology show, which slated it as a two-part episode the next year.
- Pete's Dragon is the first film involving animation made without any of the Nine Old Men, Walt Disney's original team of animators.
- To place Elliott in live-action scenes, the filmmakers used a yellowscreen compositing method first employed on Mary Poppins, overlaying up to three layers at once: a live foreground, a live background and an animated middle ground holding the dragon.
- Writer Malcolm Marmorstein rewrote the story from a contemporary setting into a period one and turned the dragon from wholly imaginary into a real creature. Earlier drafts kept Elliott mostly invisible, with Dr. Terminus chopping him up as a get-rich scheme.
- Disney artist Ken Anderson, fearing audiences would 'lose patience' with an unseen dragon, lobbied for Elliott to be shown visible more often. Writer Malcolm Marmorstein later admitted a completely invisible dragon 'was no fun' and 'was lacking' in a visual medium made for children.
- Don Hahn, an assistant director to Don Bluth on Pete's Dragon, picked up experience combining live action and animation on the film, which he later drew on for Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
