Pixar Releases ‘The Good Dinosaur’ Teaser

After shuffling directors and pushing back its release date, Pixar’s The Good Dinosaur is slowly emerging out of stasis in the form of a teaser trailer that shows little but promises much.

It’s your archetypal narrative about a boy and his dog. Except the boy happens to be a mature dinosaur — whose species never suffered an asteroid-induced mass extinction, as the trailer explains — and the dog is a feral child who learns how to become a human. The high concept pitch belonged to the film’s original director, Bob Peterson, who was removed from the project and replaced by Peter Sohn in the hot seat.

Arlo’s growth is skipped over entirely in the teaser, which spends most of its time focusing on the asteroid that never hit Earth, as well as the lush environment and teeming life the planet calls home. Except for a longshot glimpse at the end, Arlo doesn’t even show up, which is something of a hedge, given that Sohn won the director’s chair because of his dogged pursuit of that well-traveled boy-and-his-dog archetype, as well as the fearsome role the natural world plays in the animated feature. Sohn told Yahoo:

The heart of it has always remained the same in terms of the boy and the dog. I’ve been very diligent with the story team to kind of protect that and focus on that more. In terms of the world, it has kind of changed a bit here and there, and some of the characters have gone out and new ones have come in.

We’ve been trying to find physical obstacles and and emotional obstacles for our main character, and nature can represent both. In a lot of the research that we’ve done, going out into the Northwest and out into the wilderness, I cannot tell you how beautiful and scary it can be, and how quickly nature can just turn on you. And we’re trying to finding the truth in that in terms of Arlo’s growth.

The Good Dinosaur finally arrives Nov. 25, just in time for Thanksgiving.