‘The Good Dinosaur’ teaser trailer: Pixar asks, ‘What if ... ?’

The newly released teaser trailer for Pixar’s “The Good Dinosaur” is turning heads — particularly parasaurolophus and apatosaurus heads.

Set for release Nov. 25, the long-gestating animated tale hinges on a major hypothetical: What if the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs millions of years ago narrowly missed Earth?

In the minute-long trailer, a 6-mile-wide chunk of rock streaks harmlessly across the sky instead of causing global devastation, and it elicits not much more than a curious glance and a shrug from grazing dinosaurs.

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Though only glimpsed in the teaser, the near-miss also sets up the movie’s central relationship, in which a teenage apatosaurus named Arlo takes in a wild young human boy named Spot as a pet. The pair can be seen running through a prehistoric wilderness, Spot perched atop Arlo’s head, at the video’s climax.

For Disney-owned Pixar, “The Good Dinosaur” has been a long time coming. In 2013, the animation studio removed director Bob Peterson from the movie and pushed back its release date from summer 2014 to this fall. The shuffle left Pixar without a feature film last year, for the first time since 2005. (As a result, Pixar has two films this year: “Good Dinosaur” and “Inside Out,” which arrives June 19.)

Peter Sohn, who had been serving as Peterson’s codirector (a deputy position at Pixar), was eventually bumped up to director; “The Good Dinosaur” is his first film in that capacity.

“The heart of the story remains the same,” Sohn told the Los Angeles Times in November. “It’s always been about this young dinosaur growing up. But the world itself has changed a lot. Nature has become a character.”

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