Can The Good Dinosaur help Pixar roar again?

It’s shaping up to be a stellar year for Pixar after the disappointments of 2014, when the animation house failed to get a movie into cinemas. Inside Out picked up universally positive reviews following its screening at the Cannes film festival, and the Disney-owned animation studio finally has a late November release date for The Good Dinosaur, the first trailer for which has just hit the web.

The teaser doesn’t tell us all that much about Peter Sohn’s movie, other than it’s pitched around the idea that the dinosaurs were never wiped out by a cataclysmic event (in this case a giant meteor) and have evolved into intelligent creatures. We know from past Pixar missives that the film centres on a 21m-tall (70ft) teenage Apatosaurus named Arlo who befriends a human boy named Spot.

“Arlo himself is what we would have become, able to articulate and have certain emotions and connection to family,” Sohn told Yahoo recently. “They’ve become us, essentially … I’m trying to treat Spot in a very kind of animalistic way, where he doesn’t speak very much. He’s very feral.”

The trailer does at least show brief glimpses of the evolved dinosaurs that Arlo and Spot will meet during their adventure. And they appear to be living in a land that’s untouched by civilisation. Hence, there are no tyrannosaurs driving giant dino cars to giant dino office blocks, or cigar-smoking sauropods wearing giant dino-clothes in this version of events, which let’s face it is probably a good thing. Nor do we see any Flintstones-like examples of Jurassic-era tech: these giant reptiles look just like most kids would expect them to, except they can talk.

Sohn, who stepped in following the departure of Up co-director Bob Peterson, is best known for the wonderful Pixar short Partly Cloudy, one of my personal favourites. Like much of the best work by the animation studio, it takes a childhood fancy (in this case storks delivering babies) and imagines the array of quirky conceptual furniture that might be required to make it function in a believable meta-reality. If Sohn can bring a similar sense of humour to The Good Dinosaur, we could be in for a treat.

Pixar has been known to take the lazy route towards racking up the greenbacks in the past: there are not too many layers to peel back when viewing its Cars movies, and Sohn’s film boasts a similarly merchandise-friendly central premise. But there’s reason to be hopeful that The Good Dinosaur might exist on smarter territory.

For a studio that so often deals in fantasy protagonists - anthropomorphic toys, insects, fish, cars etc - Pixar movies at their best have said some pretty incisive things about the human experience. Think Jessie the cowgirl’s heartfelt song of sadness and abandonment in Toys 2, or pensive clownfish Marlin’s struggle to avoid overprotectiveness despite his personal battle with bereavement in Finding Nemo. Let’s hope The Good Dinosaur can mine gold from similarly unlikely materials.

At the very least, the fact that the movie was delayed until Pixar got it right suggests studio bigwigs were determined not to let anything substandard reach the production stage. Ditching a film-maker has worked before for the company - Brave went on to win an Oscar after original director Brenda Chapman was effectively replaced part-way through by Mark Andrews. Fingers crossed, The Good Dinosaur will roar its way into cinemas this winter, rather than stumbling over the line like an ailing stegosaurus after a fatal T-Rex bite.