And Elliot's need to find Pete may threaten to expose his existence to the residents of the nearby logging town. Six years later, the now mostly-feral Pete (Oakes Fegley) is found by forest ranger Grace (Bryce Dallas Howard), and brought back to civilization. He's found there by an intelligent, furry green dragon that Pete names Elliot-after the puppy in his favorite picture book-and which becomes Pete's caretaker. Indeed, the premise here bears virtually no resemblance to that of the original, opening with a car accident that orphans a pre-school-age boy named Pete and leaves him alone in the woods. Co-writer/director David Lowery takes the raw material of the original Pete's Dragon and shapes it into something utterly distinctive-and not just because the dragon is now CGI instead of a hand-drawn cartoon. If there's a case where the 21st-century epidemic of cinematic regurgitation is most justified, it's when a fundamentally sound original concept was turned into something with a recognizable name, but negligible quality. When people scoffed at Disney stamping "classic" on everything released during the area of clamshell-covered VHS tapes, this was exactly what they were scoffing at. The 1977 version of Pete's Dragon emerged from an era where it's amazing that the Disney brand didn't disintegrate completely, as the company alternated between goofy live-action fare and occasional animated features-or, in the case of the original Pete's Dragon, combined the two. While Disney has turned self-cannibalizing its library of family classics into its current identity, there's always room for an exception. Something interesting has happened with regard to Disney's remake of Pete's Dragon, or more precisely, something interesting hasn't happened: Nobody is crying bloody murder about it.
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