
Pixar’s best talent, aside from making amazing and
heartwarming movies, is creating a comprehensive and
interconnected Pixar universe for its movies to exist in. It’s why, if
you watch closely enough, you can see references to other Pixar movies
in the movies. It’s always exciting to see some of our favorite
characters pop up again, but it’s even more exciting to see sneak peeks of what’s to come in the future. If you look back at some of Pixar’s most recent films, turns out they’ve been giving us clues about The Good Dinosaur, which hits US theaters next week, for some time now.
Let’s start back in 2013, when Pixar released Monsters University, a prequel to everyone’s favorite Monsters Inc. For just a moment, we get a glimpse of Good Dinosaur‘s protagonist, Arlo, in the fake bedroom set-up the monsters practice in:

It happens just for a second. We had no reason to suspect that that little dinosaur toy was the start of something amazing.
When it comes to Pixar’s most recent release, Inside Out, they got a little more heavy-handed with the references. There’s not one but two
appearances from the upcoming dinosaur characters. How did they manage
to sneak some dinosaurs into this modern day movie? Well:

Look! That’s clearly Arlo’s tail!

And that’s clearly the dinosaur from the most recent trailer — which, if you missed, you should definitely
watch below. It’s giving us so many feels, and now we can’t stop
rewatching old Pixar movies to see if there are any other hints about
this magical production (let us know if you find any!) before it comes
to the big screen this Thanksgiving.