Updated 8/25/19
We already knew that Pixar Animation Studios had two releases on the schedule for 2020 — Dan (Monsters University) Scanlon‘s Onward (scheduled for March 6, 2020) and Up and Inside Out director Pete Docter‘s semi-mysterious Soul (June 19) — but Walt Disney Picture has dates on hold for Pixar movies to be released in 2021 and 2022. The studio chose to ignore that fact in the Pixar portion of its D23 presentation, instead using it to announce some of the voice cast for Docter’s film and show some of Onward.
All we knew about Soul up until now was the general tagline for the two-time Oscar winner’s next movie, which was:
“A journey from the streets of New York City to the cosmic realms, discovering the answers to life’s most important questions.”
We now know that it will follow a middle-aged band teacher named Joe who dreams of becoming a jazz performer. When he dies, he ends up at the “You Seminar” where souls are given personality, so yeah, Docter is not getting any less esoteric after his concept for Inside Out, which as weird as it was managed to become a huge Oscar-winning hit.
Joe is voiced by Jamie Foxx while Tina Fey will also provide her first animation voice role since DreamWorks Animation’s Megamind, and you can see images of their characters below:
The voice cast also includes Roots drummer Questlove, Phylicia Rashad (The Cosby Show) and Daveed Diggs (Hamilton).
The music for Soul will be provided by jazz musician and bandleader Jon Batiste along with Oscar-winners Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (The Social Network).
Onward features the voices of Tom Holland, Chris Pratt, Octavia Spencer and Julia Louis-Dreyfus (in a super-rare movie appearance and her return to Pixar after providing a voice in 1998’s A Bug’s Life!), and it has the tagline:
Set in a suburban fantasy world, two teenage elf brothers embark on a quest to discover if there is still magic out there.
MCU vets Holland and Pratt voice the two brothers Ian and Bairley Lightfoot, while Louis-Dreyfus voices their mother, all of whom were at D23 as Disney showed the first footage from the movie.
The logo and image below are essentially from the already-released poster.
UPDATE: After this story was posted, Disney released a NEW poster and exclusive still at D23.
