Pixar to Make Day of the Dead Themed Film, Tim Burton Surprisingly Not Involved

Last summer at Disney’s D23 expo, Pixar laid out its future movie line up, including a number of movies so deep in the preproduction process they didn’t even have names. The Untitled Pixar Movie That Takes You Inside The Mind didn’t even have a code name. Last night, however, the animation studio gave a bit of an update on what it’s got in store. Emphasis on a bit.

That Mind movie is aiming for a 2015 release, courtesy of Pete Docter, director of Up and Monsters, Inc. Their untitled movie about a world where dinosaurs never went extinct and now coexist peaceably alongside human beings (which I am still pretending is Dinotopia: The Pixar Movie until further notice) is now titled: The Good Dinosaur and is due in May of 2014. What’s new in the line up, however, is that director of Toy Story 3 Lee Unkrich and producer Darla K. Anderson would be heading up a new production about the Mexican holiday la Dia de los Muertos.

Unfortunately, with the immense lead time on animated films, that’s pretty much all we know at this point. The only thing I feel confident in saying for sure is that the combination of Pixar’s devotion to visuals with the artistic aesthetic and color palette of Day of the Dead celebrations will be breathtaking. And that I’m crossing my fingers for a Calavera Catrina as a major character.

Of course there’s no guarantee that the movie will make it to screen. Pixar is considered relatively brave where studios are concerned, in that it’s not afraid to scrap a movie completely even after it’s gone through several concept art stages if it thinks the film is simply not working. Consider Newt, the film that would have released this summer instead of Brave (then known as The Bear and the Bow).

(via The Wrap.)