Pixar Miscellany

You know me, I'm a big Pixar fanboy, which is why I'll probably be heading out to see Cars 2 before the summer is done...even though the trailers look a little too fart-joke-centric.

But, with the forthcoming release of Cars 2, we're getting a whole bevy of Pixar news.

First up, as is Pixar tradition, the first teaser trailer for their next film will be in front of Cars 2.  They're next one is called Brave.  It comes out next summer, and we've also got the first teaser poster.

Brave? is Pixar's first stab at doing a fairy tale.  Set in medieval Scotland, it follows the adventures of Princess Merida, an accomplished archer whose young headstrong ways soon brings turmoil to her kingdom, and she has to embark on a quest to set things right.

Brave is also notable in that it'll be Pixar's first film with a female protagonist.  For a time, there, it was also going to be Pixar's first film with a female director, Brenda Chapman.  However, back in the fall, Chapman was removed from the project and replaced with Mark Andrews.  For all her hard work on the film to date, Chapman is still getting a co-director credit.  And, as she conceived the original story, she's also still getting a "written by" credit.

As for the voices, Merida will be voiced by Scottish actress Kelly Macdonald.  Her parents, King Fergus and Queen Elinor, will be voiced by Billy Connolly and Emma Thompson.  Comic relief in the film comes from the three lords of the kingdom, Lord MacGuffin, Lord Macintosh, and Lord Dingwall, to be voiced by Kevin McKidd, Craig Ferguson, and Robbie Coltrane.  Nice to see that Pixar learned the lesson from Finding Nemo and are trying to get real accents instead of people to fake them. 

(There's this bonus feature on the Finding Nemo DVD where they take the fake Australian accents that the animators used in the story reel and compared them to the real Australian accents used by the real Australian actors who voiced the characters in the final film and yeah...the difference is pretty noticable.)

Brave hits theatres on June 22, 2012.

As for the rest of the Pixar slate, Monster University, the prequel to Monsters, Inc, will be hitting theatres in Summer of 2013. 

And the one that has everyone scratching their heads right now is the mystery project coming out in November of 2013.  When Pixar made the announcement earlier this week, no title was announced, no plot information was revealed, none of the attached talent was discussed...just that they have a film scheduled for release on November 27, 2013.  Pete Docter, the director of Up, has apparently been cooking up something, and the rampant speculation says this is Docter's next project.