
Pete is unharmed but alone in the woods on the verge of being attacked by a pack of wolves, he’s rescued by the appearance of the titular dragon, which scares them off. Suddenly, a deer bounds across the road, the car spins out of control and tumbles down a hill, and Pete’s parents are killed instantly. He’s on a car trip with his parents on a remote highway somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, sitting in the back seat and reading his favorite book, “Elliot Gets Lost,” about a dog. Young Pete (Levi Alexander) is about five years old. In a stealthily audacious way, Lowery has made a sort of neorealist fantasy, in which potentially nonsensical whimsy turns out to make a lot of sense.
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The movie is a fantasy about the friendship, in the wild, of a boy and a dragon-and the duo’s unexpected confrontation with ordinary human company-and Lowery anchors that fantasy in practical and inconvenient details, which tether the magical realm to the material one. As realized by Lowery, it is filled with quiet joy and simple wonder. It’s as if Disney were inaugurating a new artisanal or organic line-one that “Pete’s Dragon” inaugurates gloriously, with heart and style. creation, conjures an awe-inspiring physicality.

It is a drama punctuated by comic moments, has no singing or dancing, and exchanges the conspicuous artifice of a hand-drawn animated dragon for a dragon that, despite being a C.G.I.

Lowery’s remake is set in the present day. The original version of the movie is set early in the twentieth century.

When that film came out, I wrote enthusiastically about Lowery’s art, but I wouldn’t have thought it a natural fit for the requirements of “Pete’s Dragon,” Disney’s special-effect-centric remake of its 1977 live-action-plus-animation fantasy. Fortunately, the folks at Disney did, and they were right, for reasons that I could have intuited from the virtues of “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints.” In that melodrama, Lowery seems to express his own feelings of wonder in the presence of mighty forces beyond those of his characters themselves, and he realizes those mighty forces with an intensely sensuous, firsthand, experiential immediacy-and that’s exactly what he brings to “Pete’s Dragon." The director is David Lowery, whose 2013 feature “ Ain’t Them Bodies Saints,” a sort of modern and modernist updating of Western tropes, is a powerfully intimate drama with a vast lyrical resonance. If the name of the director of “Pete’s Dragon” were kept under wraps, the artistry displayed throughout the film would be a surprise. Directed by David Lowery, the remake of “Pete’s Dragon” is a neorealist fantasy in which potentially nonsensical whimsy turns out to make a lot of sense.
