Pixar Animation Announces Untitled Suburban Fantasy Film [D23 Expo 2017]

During D23 today, Pixar Animation announced a new animated project from the team behind Monsters University. The project is slotted for either 2020 0r 2021 – one of the dates Disney has claimed – and takes place in a "suburban fantasy world." The untitled film is set in a world that doesn't feel unfamiliar to our own, based on editor-in-chief Peter Sciretta's description of what he saw and heard, but technology has taken over in a land of fantastical creatures and old magic.

Below, learn more about the Pixar urban fantasy film.

There are elves, trolls, dragons, and unicorns in the untitled Pixar film. On the poster, there's a red dragon flying in a purple sunset sky above a city. "This film takes place in a fantasy world, but a modern fantasy world," Pixar chief creative officer John Lasseter told the crowd. "Magic used to exist, but it was too difficult to do. Unicorns are everywhere, they are basically rodents." In this world, the unicorns eat out of the trash like possums.

Dan Scanlon who co-directed Monsters University, is directing this film. For Scanlon, his next collaboration with the animation company is very personal. When he was young, his father passed away. He saw photos and videos of him, but he and his younger brother never heard his voice until later on in their lives. When Scanlon was a teenager, he was sent a cassette tape by a family member featuring his father's voice. All his father said on the recording was "bye," but Scanlon said it felt like magic to him and his brother.

The experienced inspired the suburban fantasy film, which is about two teenage brothers who lose their father. They travel to a fantasy world in hopes of finding him, to spend one last day with him. The brief description out of D23 is very vague, but perhaps magic plays a role in the boys' quest to spend another day with their father. Scanlon's question of who his father was is the basis for the movie.

Scanlon plans on mixing the fantastical with the mundane, as the world has lost interest in magic in the untitled film. Because magic is too hard to pull off, the inhabitants of the world simply stopped caring. There are no other details beyond the few story points, including a release date, but presumably, we'll know a whole more about this film soon enough.