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We haven’t seen much from the upcoming remake of the live-action/animated Disney film Pete’s Dragon yet, but audiences at the D23 Expo in Anaheim, California this weekend got a short glimpse of what we might be seeing. I got a chance to chat with star Bryce Dallas Howard (Jurassic World) backstage, where she shared a bit about her character and why doing the film is so important to her. For the record, the dragon below is from the 1977 film.

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Howard talked about feeling the love from thew D23 Expo crowd. “It’s really cool. It’s amazing because – first of all, when I was backstage and I was hearing all the roars, I was like, are they on a ride? Is there a roller coaster out there? And then I went out there and I was like, oh, there’s just a lot of people,” she laughed. “It’s so fun because, when you make a lot of movies, I mean, we feel that sense of excitement and anticipation, and you hope that the audience feels the same. So when you get to be in a situation like this, it’s really encouraging.”

She told us what it’s like to inhabit a universe like the one in Pete’s Dragon. “It’s a big deal. First of all, I was so relieved because it’s not like a remake of the original film. It’s definitely a reimagining of the central concept, an orphan boy who’s best friend is a dragon. But other than that, it’s quite different, which relaxed me enormously. I was like, I don’t know, am I going to be singing ‘Candle on the Water?’ What am I going to be doing? But yeah, it is very different and it’s something that, for me, personally, that really resonated for me for my kids. It has these messages and these lessons that are really important and will really define a child when they watch something like this, and make them have a hero or see that this is the kind of walk that I want to have in life, because this is the way that Pete (Oakes Fegley) was. And I think those kinds of stories are really important.”

I asked her about her character in the film. She said, “She is a woman who is a forest ranger and she stumbles upon Pete in the woods and a lot of the story is the mystery of who is this child and how has he survived this long. Then we find this dragon.”

Pete’s Dragon will hit theaters on August 12, 2016.

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Jenna Busch

Jenna Busch is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Legion of Leia and has hosted and written for sites like Nerdist, ComingSoon.net, Metro, Birth. Movies. Death., IGN, AOL, Huffington Post and more. She co-hosted Cocktails With Stan with the legendary Stan Lee and has appeared on Attack of the Show, Fresh Ink, Tabletop with Wil Wheaton, in the documentary She Makes Comics, on NPR and Al Jazeera America, and has covered film/TV/gaming/comics for years. She's currently a co-host on Most Craved. She's been published in the comics anthology Womanthology, is a chapter author for Star Wars Psychology: Dark Side of the Mind, Game of Thrones Psychology and Star Trek Psychology and more, and owns a terrifying amount of swords and 20-sided dice. There are also those My Little Pony trailer voice overs that give one nightmares.