If you're tired of the recent rash of Pixar sequels (because, really, who hasn't been longing to find out about Mike and Sully's monstrous college adventures?), then you're very much in luck. Not only is next summer's "Brave" an all new property, part loving homage to Celtic myhtology, part feminist parable (we hope), but in the next few years we also have a new film about man's coexistence with dinosaurs (directed by Bob Peterson) and, even more tantalizingly, a film directed by "Up"'s Pete Docter and set inside the human mind. Pixar/Disney bigwig John Lasseter was recently on "Charlie Rose" (via Slashfilm) and spilled a few more details about the secretive project.
Right after the project was announced at D23, we announced that Michael Arndt (of "Toy Story 3" and "Little Miss Sunshine" fame) would be writing the screenplay and that it would be about the formation of ideas. (This concept is clashing with a similarly themed short over at Fox's animated branch Blue Sky Studios). While on "Charlie Rose," Lasseter said of the project, "Pete Docter, from 'Monsters, Inc.' and 'Up,' is doing a new film that takes place inside of a girl’s mind and it is about her emotions as characters, and that is unlike anything you’ve ever seen."
This is pretty exciting, since it means that, after "Brave," Pixar is going to have another female character at the center of one of its feature films (and considering how wonderful the young girl in "Little Miss Sunshine" was, it's a nice fit for Arndt who wrote that screenplay) and the idea of separate characters for each emotion is pretty fantastic. At some point, and this might not exactly come across in the final product, the monsters in Spike Jonze's troubled "Where the Wild Things Are," were supposed to symbolize Max's different emotions. We imagine things will be considerably wilder in this Pixar film.
The "unlike anything you've ever seen" comment lines up nicely with what we've been hearing about the film, which is that it is mind-blowingly ambitious, even by admittedly lofty Pixar standards. As Slashfilm points out, there are currently two dates on the Pixar calendar that need filling: November 27th, 2013 and May 30th, 2014. We're guessing that with the complexity and ambition of the Docter film (there is an insane amount of R&D being done on it), it'll need that later release date. Watch the rest of the Lasseter interview (a portion of it is below) for some truly great stuff, not just about Pixar but about Steve Jobs, the history of animation, and why Lasseter will always work in the medium (instead of switching over to live action). Great stuff, John. You're almost forgiven for "Cars 2." Almost.
