The Crying Machine: David Lowery's "Pete's Dragon" (2016)
For kids of all ages, the live-action "Pete's Dragon" is a low-key masterpiece.
(I had more to say about this film than I originally thought. If you make it to the end, you get a lot of great screenshots.)
What might make a viewer cry while watching a movie is a deeply personal matter, dependent on one’s individual life experience. Perhaps you once nearly lost a child to a lab-grown mutant dinosaur, which could make certain scenes in Jurassic World: Rebirth really emotional for you. But while accounting for the personal triggers of audience members is a nigh impossible task, there do seem to be audio-visual and narrational tactics available to filmmakers that can precisely trigger the tightening of the throat—that sticky “lump” you feel when you’re about to cry, or especially when trying to hold back tears. This is medically known as the “globus sensation,” which is also commonly used to describe throat discomfort due to acid reflux. This probably results from signals sent by the human brain’s insular cortex (or insula), which is an important area for understanding how our body responds to emotion. I am not a neurologist but I do have wi-fi.
Disney’s 2016 live-action remake of Pete’s Dragon—directed by the chameleonic David Lowery, whose credits include the Terrence Malick-esque Ain’t Them Bodies Saints (2013) and one of my favorite films of this decade, The Green Knight (2021)—seems carefully calibrated to target and subsequently melt the viewer’s insular cortex. Though I loved the film when I first saw it around its initial release, it took me almost ten years to watch it again due to my strong memory of it making me a lumpy mess within about 15 minutes, and a puddle of salty tears by the end. It is a veritable crying machine, an assembly line of tactics for making a viewer blubber.
In attempting to explain how Pete’s Dragon is such a successful crying machine, I’m also partially here to argue for just how damn good this movie is (in its unassuming way), and let me be clear from the top: this is not a sad movie, just a bit subdued by Disney standards, and you should totally watch it with your kids. I’m not sure if the insular cortex of children is developed enough—or experienced enough in the labor of wistful reflection—to cause tears as a result of ‘music while a dragon flies around and/or over shots of Bryce Dallas Howard & Robert Redford's Facial Expressions,’ but if so it won’t lead to nightmares.
The film commences with immediate PG parental death; 5-year-old Pete survives a car wreck that kills his parents. This is a Disney film, so it’s not particularly intense, and nothing grisly is depicted (Fig. 1). Wandering the nearby forest, Pete is pursued by a pack of wolves but saved by a furry green dragon, who places the teary-eyed Pete in his giant palm and slowly lifts him into the sky (you might already be crying). Six years later, over lovely shots of the lush logging town of Millhaven, Meacham (an endearingly wholesome Robert Redford) regales some cute kids with his story of seeing a green dragon in the forest many years ago, and the local legend of this myterious creature. His daughter Grace (an endearingly wholesome Bryce Dallas Howard)—a park ranger who works in Elliot’s forest home with her handsome, ethical logger boyfriend (an endearingly wholesome Wes Bentley as Jack)—shows up to gently throw cold water on his tale. Meacham tells the kids, “You see, my daughter, she knows a thing or two, but only if it's staring at her in the face. If you go through life only seeing what’s right in front of you, you’re gonna miss out on a whole lot.” We’re in kids’ movie mode, don’t worry!
The sweet, charming register of the latter sequence establishes the film’s entire vibe: unhurried, pleasantly literal, and above all simply warm—both visually and thematically. Cinematographer Bojan Bazelli (who shot one of the most gorgeous horror movies of the century, the 2002 American remake of The Ring) provides the film a sleepy late-afternoon glow that comfortably envelops Lowery and Toby Halbrooks’s appropriately straightforward screenplay. For greater comprehension of my thoughts below, the plot of the film is summarized as such: Grace and Jack find Pete in the forest and try to take him in, but Pete tries to escape back to Elliot. Jack’s dickhead brother Gavin (a sour-faced Karl Urban) captures Elliot and imprisons him but Elliot escapes and goes on a minor rampage. Pete wants to return to Elliot, but they both know they will never be safe together. They part, and Pete lives with Jack and Grace. But Elliot has found other dragon friends, and the humans visit them at the film’s end. Even villainous Gavin is redeemed. It’s wonderfully simple.
Framed by these visual and narrative frameworks—cozy and pastoral, unpretentiously reliant on accessible emotion—Pete’s Dragon is primed to energize the crying machine. This won’t work on everyone, but the precise construction of childlike wonder hits me hard. Around 12:00, in the first scene establishing 11-year-old Pete’s lovingly playful relationship with Elliot, Pete runs away from Elliot, screaming for the dragon to pursue as the music matches Pete’s energy with joyous descending arpeggios of strings and horns. Screen direction here is precise—Pete runs in a diagonal away from the camera with Elliot in the foreground (Fig. 2), after which a reverse shot depicts Elliot flying toward him, with figure movement consistent as left-to-right (Fig. 3). We cut to a medium shot of Pete’s legs rushing forward with maintained screen direction, a shot that will be echoed at the film’s end (Fig. 4 and 21). The film cuts to a centered full shot behind Elliot as he runs towards a cliff (Fig. 5), from which he leaps as the film cuts backwards in space to a longer view (Fig. 6), providing the visual space to see Elliot plunge downwards from the top of the screen to presumably catch Pete as he falls. Here, the music stops, tensely anticipating their airborne union. Two seconds later, as the camera pushes forward to the cliff edge, Elliot rises up with Pete now on his back as the music swells again (Fig. 7). Grand shots of Elliot soaring through the air ensue, each more stunning than the last (Figs. 8-9). The music almost literally moves with Elliot’s ascent. As Elliot flies upward, the score begins a crescendo—the horns get louder and a choir comes in, building tension which is released with a percussive crash at the exact moment (in Fig. 8) when Elliot reaches his peak in the sky. As the dragon flies downwards from here, the music elegantly matches his movement—now down, and then straight through the sky and valleys below the clouds—with a contrapuntal motion between choir and lower-registered strings and horns, which is also the film’s principal musical theme. The emotional affect here thus directly correlates with the direction of movement on screen—rising and falling, settling into a state of wonderment with the theme melody.
This is roughly where I begin blubbering. Pete’s has primed us with this poor kid’s witnessing of parental death, with Redford’s folksy wisdom about the power of belief, and that damn Bryce Dallas Howard Face with its preternatural emotional resonance, as if she’s always on the verge of crying from how beautiful trees are, or from the sorrow inherent in life’s ephemerality. Ascending and spinning with Pete and Elliot in the sky, we are released from the PG horrors of the opening scene. Some sort of emotional justice has been served for Pete. He deserves this fantastical experience of rare wonder. Goddamnit, I’m not even watching the movie right now and my insula is heating up.
A cynical view of the scene described above would judge it as formulaic. You’ve seen this in How to Train Your Dragon, and so on. The music ebbs and flows at just the right moments. There’s nothing unconventional going on here. But just because it’s a crying machine, implying a sense of robotic or formal rigidity, doesn’t mean we cannot acknowledge its perfect execution. In the moment, you forget you’ve seen this before. It feels organic, like you’re not being manipulated. We subconsciously respect its emotional engineering. Besides, if a car isn’t engineered with precision it will simply explode, or at least its exterior could become vulnerable to the insidious combination of sunlight and water, like a Cybertruck. Jokes aside, the preservation of screen direction may account for some of the emotional effect here, as bizarre as that may sound to some. The predominantly left-to-right movement connotes the passage of time as experienced by emotion-bearing human beings. Charts and graphs and text (for English, at least) are read left-to-right, suggesting movement through time, or a vector towards the future. The connotation of linear time—the receding of the past—also implies the evanescence of life, its relentless change and impermanence. Am I delving too deeply here? Is this silly overanalysis? Well, then why am I crying so much? My insular cortex can’t deal with all this: my faded childhood, the movement of flight, modernist-romanticist melodics, traumatized children riding dragons, the relentless speed of time’s arrow.
Music guides us here, as it always has in cinema since Max Steiner innovated the use of Wagnerian leitmotif in film scoring for 1933’s King Kong, precisely guiding the audience’s emotional response. Pete’s composer Daniel Hart takes the Romanticism-influenced John Williams-esque approach, unabashedly melodic and sentimental (as film scores have for decades, and will continue to for the lifespan of the medium).
In guiding our emotion, music often denotes genre as well. At 36:00, Gavin searches for the dragon in the forest, and Elliot uses his invisibility powers to creep around him. The shot at 36:40 is straight out of a horror movie (Fig. 10), with Elliot partially visible behind Gavin. But the music is playful and ponderous! It’s cute! He's just hiding! If you were to place dissonant Hitchcockian string stabs over that shot, the kiddos would be screaming in the aisles. When galaxy-brained Marxist film theorists in the 1970s were theorizing that the “apparatus” of cinema was poisoning us dumb sheeple with insidious ideology, as we gazed at the giant screen in the dark in a Platonic Cave situation, their argument might have made more sense if Jean-Louis Baudry had talked a lot more about music, the most manipulating force in moving image history.
Formulaic or not, convention-bound or not, within about 13 minutes Pete’s Dragon is comforting in its warm familiarity, a family movie unafraid to dribble good, honest sap on its audience without hesitation. In this it reminds me of The Neverending Story or the Hayao Miyazaki-written Studio Ghibli animated film The Secret World of Arrietty, in its old-school, subtle rejection of silly pratfalls, and its open-heartedness. It has been suggested to me by a fellow cinephile that Pete’s Dragon is analogous to live-action Miyazaki, but it may most resemble a Disney-fied version of Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are adaptation, with the tinge of melancholy that seems fused to its generally wholesome vibe. In this tradition, the wholesomeness has to be earned with a reasonable helping of contemplation of life’s uncertainties, and just a touch of nature’s cruelties: your parents dying because they avoided killing a deer on the road, the evil of man represented by Gavin imprisoning Elliot under the guise of public safety (with the implication that Elliot could be a lucrative sideshow attraction).
Lowery’s pathway to the wistful vibe of Ghibli or Jonze is also paved with hipster folk music, to great effect. About a third into the film—after Grace and Jack have found Pete in the forest and placed him in a hospital for care since he seems a bit feral—Pete escapes to return to Elliot and the forest. Running through the town’s streets, turning heads as a wild little boy in a hospital gown, Lowery chooses The Lumineers’ tearjerker track “Nobody Knows” to score the scene. Watching a little boy trying to ‘return home,’ we get these lyrics:
Nobody knows how to get back home / And we set out so long ago / Searched the heavens and the Earth below / Nobody knows how to get back home
Through the darkness to the dawn / And when I looked back you were gone / Heard your voice leading me on / Through the darkness to the dawn
I’m attempting to be somewhat clinical here but honestly am fending off involuntary globus sensation just trying to write this.
This analysis would be incomplete without noting the emotive power of professional actors looking awed by awe-inspiring stuff in the sky. This is a classic Spielberg move, best seen in the symphonic emotional overload of the ending of E.T. (Fig. 11). In Pete’s Dragon, the magic of flight similarly brings tears to one’s eye. After the film’s ‘scary part’ (Elliot’s battle on the bridge), Pete is reunited with the dragon. Grace, already a doting mom, runs after him (“Pete, wait!”), and in a reserve shot stops herself gasping as Elliot whisks them away to the sky (Fig. 12). Twenty seconds later, we get a gorgeous push-in on a stoically awed Redford watching Pete and Elliot fly away (Figs. 13-14), bringing his wisdom full-circle; perhaps Pete and Elliot are not meant for this world, and should be together (again, globus sensation alert). In the film’s ending minute discussed below, we are of course treated to another awed shot of Grace, Jack, and Jack’s daughter Natalie, gazing at the splendor of seeing Elliot flying away with his new dragon companions (Fig. 15).
The film’s final minute is an apotheosis of the cinematic crying machine’s ability to assault our insular cortex via fast movement with consistent screen direction, soaring melody, and denotation of the state of wonder. We end on tears of joy, of course. The tears are here partially caused by perfect cinematography. After a voiceover from Redford denoting a passage of time, and explaining that ‘no one saw the dragon again, but some may know where to look,’ we see Pete and the family ascend a hilltop (Fig. 16). Pete looks around with almost frantic expectation, seen in two clever, disorienting shots that almost feels like a jump cut (Figs. 17-18), enhancing our anticipation.
We are then treated to one of the most beautiful series of shots in all of children’s cinema, starting around 94:10. Pete hears Elliot behind him and turns around, smiling (Fig. 19). We cut to Elliot as he stands up, the camera’s movement creating a warm yellow lens flare (Fig. 20). Then a subtle time elision occurs—enhancing the sequence’s mythically poetic tone—as we cut to a medium shot of Pete’s lower body running left-to-right in the grass, echoing his movement in the previously-discussed scene around 12:00 (Fig. 21). We next cut to a much longer view, and we get the film’s most breathtaking shot, a multiplanar wonder of composition and visual effect (Figs. 22-24). Pete runs to frame-right in the foreground as Elliot flies in the same direction towards him in a near background plane, approaching him and landing nearby, with two additional planes of geographic features—rocky green hills in the near background, with snow-capped mountains in the deep background at upper frame-left, with a hazy sun peeking over the former at upper frame-right. This may be the most meticulously constructed image of wondrous spectacle in any adventure film this century. Naturally, the music here has built in intensity to the shot in Figs. 22-24, and over the shot (and through to the film’s end), our ears are treated to an elaborately decorated restatement of the main musical theme (heard over Figs. 8-9, around 12:40) with additional flourishes: rococo octave runs in place of the previous counter-melody.
We next cut behind the running Pete, with Elliot to his left and taking off again, the gentle slope of the hill creating a dynamic diagonal across the screen that reinforces the off-kilter feeling of the fantastical scenario (Fig. 25). Elliot plunges down ahead of us, revealing a cliff drop. We cut to a reverse shot of Pete, who stops at the cliff edge, diverging from his dangerous leap in the aforementioned scene around 12:00 (Fig. 26). (Pete’s hair is shorter, after all—he has grown up, he is no longer a feral forest creature who jumps off cliffs.) A moving drone shot shows the depth of the valley (Fig. 27), and a cut to a foregrounded Pete sees Elliot swoooping upwards as in the earlier scene (Fig. 28). This time Pete is not with him, and we cut to a reverse shot of Pete smiling up at the sky (Fig. 29), and then another reverse shot moves us back behind a full shot of Pete, revealing that there are now multiple dragons! Elliot is not alone. The film ends with an image of the family of dragons receding into the sky (Fig. 30).
The crying machine is on overdrive here, whether it’s from Bryce Dallas Howard being such a kindhearted and empathetic mother figure, or from the wonders of careful cinematographic composition precisely timed with emotive orchestral music. Pete’s Dragon is perfect.
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