Day 1 of the D23 Fan Expo saw the “Animation at The Walt Disney Studios Presentation” where Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios Chief Creative Officer John Lasseter appeared on stage to present exclusive footage and make some announcements about the upcoming Disney and Pixar Animation slates and some of the news highlights specifically for Pixar included:
* The voice cast for Bob Peterson and Peter Sohn’s The Good Dinosaur was announced. It will feature Lucas Neff from “Raising Hope” as the voice of the lead character, an Apatosaurus named Arlo, and the voice cast will include John Lithgow as the Poppa dinosaur, Frances McDormand as the Momma, Bill Hader and Neil Patrick Harris as Arlo’s brothers and Judy Greer as his sister Ivy.
* The voice cast for Pete Docter’s Inside Out, which takes place in the head of a little girl named Riley who has to move to San Francisco and has to find new friends, was also announced. The five emotions within the young girl’s brain are the movie’s lead characters with comedian Lewis Black voicing Anger, Mindy Kaling voicing Disgust, Bill Hader voicing Fear, Amy Poehler voicing Joy and “The Office” star Phyllis Smith voicing Sadness.
* They announced three new characters that will appear in Andrew Stanton’s anticipated sequel Finding Dory with Diane Keaton and Eugene Levy voicing Dory’s parents Jenny and Charlie, and Ty Burrell from “Modern Family” voicing a beluga whale named Bailey.
* Lasseter announced that the Monsters University short “Party Central,” which has Mike and Sully, reuniting with the Oozmas to throw another party, will be in front of The Good Dinosaur when it opens on May 30, 2014. It’s directed by Kelsey Mann the story supervisor on Monsters University.
* At the same time as the D23 presentation was taking place, ABC announced DisneyPixar’s television special “Toy story of TERROR” will air on the network on October 16 at 8 PM with Tom Hanks and Tim Allen reprising their roles as Woody and Buzz Lightyear, joined by Joan Cusack, Timothy Dalton, Don Rickles, Wallace Shawn and Kristen Schaal and new characters Combat Carl and Combat Carl Jr., voiced by Carl Weathers.
The first ten minutes of the special was shown for D23 attendees with the plot for the special, revealed earlier, being:
What starts out as a fun road trip for the ‘Toy Story’ gang takes an unexpected turn for the worse when the trip detours to a roadside motel. After one of the toys goes missing, the others find themselves caught up in a mysterious sequence of events that must be solved before they all suffer the same fate in this ‘Toy Story OF TERROR!'”
Make sure to check out Silas Lesnick’s live blog of the event with descriptions of all the footage shown by clicking here.
