Surf's Up, dude! Click here to view the trailer.

Next summer's Surf's Up, an animated documentary about penguin surfing enthusiasts, might be a bit of an odd sell, or a terrifying case of audience fatigue after last year's March of the Penguins, next month's animated Happy Feet, and Bob Saget's scabrously unfunny-looking Farce of the Penguins, but I think Surf's Up might have a fighting chance. Why?

Jeff Bridges as a penguin who sounds like The Dude. Were better pitches ever made? I think not. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Sony's first trailer for Surf's Up opens with the history of surfing penguins as Shia LaBoeuf narrates. "As soon as there was the first wave, there was the first surfer," he says over penguin surfing cave paintings, a hieroglyph of a penguin holding a surfboard, and my very favorite, a penguin riding down the face of Hokusai's famed painting "A Great Wave Off Kanagawa." It's the cutest effing thing I've ever seen.

Shia continues to narrate as we transition into scratchy Super-8 footage of a penguin getting up onto a board and I have to tell you I am loving the commitment to the theme. No half-assing it for Sony here.

"Nobody saw what surfing could really be," Shia continues, adorably, "until Big Z did it." Aha! The Dude! As an emperor penguin! The unseen documentarian asks Shia to explain who Big Z is, and he does not say, "duh, he is The Dude," because the all-penguin revue of The Big Lebowski has not yet made its way to Antarctica, I don't think. They're still playing the Staples Center.

We see a crowd of wee penguins watching as Z rides a truly huge wave — and bravo, graphics folks, because I'm told it's excruciatingly hard to make water look right with computer animation — and the delightful piano score gets very insistent as Shia says, "He lived so hard because he wasn't afraid to live — he wasn't afraid to die" as the whitecap rolls over Z and — oh, precious scared baby penguins! — we maybe think Z is dead.

But no! He comes slicing out of the tunnel of water, standing backward on his board, and I kind of want to go home and see if ESPN shows surfing because this is awesome. Although I doubt they show surfing penguins, so I hate reality.

Z comes to Antarctica and we see him greeting a crowd of admiring crested penguins who kind of look like Gary Busey. We learn that our narrator, among the crested breed, is named Cody, so I can stop calling him Shia. He toddles out as Big Z bestows some sort of Z-emblazoned necklace on him.

And now we transition to the action part of today's entertainment, as a more grown-up Cody rides down a breaker to what sounds a bit like the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Cody's paddling, and the voiceover is him talking to the interviewer and then, hilariously, giving one of those "confessional booth" stand-up interviews so crucial to reality TV. Cody wipes out just as he says his surfing debut "is gonna be awesome!" Ouch. If he wasn't animated and a mammal perfectly suited by eons of evolution to an aquatic environment, that might hurt.

The movie is billed as "a true story," which I find very funny. Along with Pixar's Ratatouille, I think this might be my most anticipated animated film of next summer. Which isn't to say I'm not looking forward to Happy Feet — I am, and even more so because the Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix trailer will be on it — but I'm kind of in love with these adorable little critters. One of the best parts of a press preview I attended this summer was a clip the movie's animators put together to convince Bridges to come on board. They animated Big Z walking around his lair, acting out the "I'm The Dude" scene from The Big Lebowski. It was priceless, and I desperately hope it will make its way to the movie's official site or eventually be on the DVD so all y'all can love it too.