Pretty much any day that starts with someone talking nonchalantly about selling the organs of dead babies could use something lighthearted to restore one’s faith in humanity.  Fortunately, Pixar chose today to debut the first trailer for their next movie, The Good Dinosaur:

It’s not quite as explicit in the trailer as it was in the quick teaser they did a few months ago, but the starting premise is an alternate universe where the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs misses the Earth instead, allowing them to live long enough to encounter man.  From there springs a boy-and-his-dog tale of this young Apatosaurus named Arlo who makes friends with the little cave-boy that he names Spot as he tries to make his way back home.

Yes, in a cute twist, the dinosaur is the boy and the human is the dog.

This movie actually should have debuted before Pixar’s latest hit Inside Out, but it went through some very significant changes during production that delayed its release. First they ended up ended up switching directors from Bob Peterson to Peter Sohn, and then Sohn’s vision for the movie included completely revamping the story.  That in turn resulted in replacing most of the voice cast, and ultimately it forced Disney/Pixar to push The Good Dinosaur from its original 2014 release to this upcoming November.

It’s hard to say how that will affect the movie in the end considering it’s not the first time Pixar has changed directors like that, having swapped out Jan Pinkava for Brad Bird on Ratatouille for example. I’m inclined to trust Pixar knows what they’re doing given how great their track record is for delivering excellent movies.

Plus the trailer certainly seems encouraging.  The concept is neat.  The photo-realistic look of the backgrounds combined with the more cartoony style for the characters is a really cool juxtaposition, and the two characters already have a certain charm to them despite the limited interactions we get to see in the trailer. The lovely piece of music that backs it up is apparently called “Crystals” by Of Monsters and Men, whose iTunes download is helpfully linked in the Youtube description.  It’ll be interesting to see if that shows up in the soundtrack or is just something they picked to use for the trailer.

Then again, given my Twitter handle is @crankytrex, I may be somewhat biased towards any media depicting dinosaurs, especially that which doesn’t feature them as mindless killing machines like in Jurassic World.  One thing is for certain though, they’re going to make a small fortune selling that little green dinosaur stuffed animal to the kids who end up going to see this movie.

So what do you guys think? Will Pixar be up against itself at the Oscars, or will all the production problems result in a not-so-good dinosaur movie?

If you’d like to hear more from me, you can follow me on Twitter @crankytrex or check out my other writing at buzzpo.com.