Well, they're all being played by posh English spies, Egyptian Spaniard swordsmen, Russian submarine captains, Chicago Irish cops, and a dude from the future who wears a diaper, bandoleers, and thigh-high boots.

TURNABOUT IS FAIR PLAY, SEAN CONNERY

Gerard Butler was on UK tv a couple of months ago playing for Celtic in a charity football match and when he was being interviewed he was all sorts of Scottish

(this has nothing to do with anything really, you just reminded me about it when you mention Butler )

Those accents are all fine, but they're definitely actual Scots Scotting up the place, and being all Scottish about it, a bit like tall people actively making a point of their height, rather than just being ordinarily overbearing.

They're all more authentic than Simon Pegg's Scotty, for example, which was a good effort on his part, but with flaws.

Are you sure that was Pixar? I'm pretty sure that was Dreamworks. Yeah, Dreamworks. That makes more sense.

I hadn't noticed the "clarified Scot" tint of their accents the first time I saw the trailer weeks ago, but yeah, it makes sense they would do that to help it play internationally.

If that's the case though, think there's a chance that could actually impede on the performances? Like, extra mental cycles have to go towards specific, unnatural enunciations.

But hey could be wrong and that could just be the thing you're getting paid to be a voice actor for. Dunno.

MONSTERS INC IS A SAINT

I assume Cars 2 was flawed since the film was an exercise in nostalgia, and everything was geared towards that theme.

Taking the same group of characters and throwing them into some wacky spy scenario probably worked about as well as that episode of Happy Days where they went to space.

Judgements on Brave reserved on the grounds that Pixar trailers are understandably broad and conservative.

I think the trailer only really shows the first parts of the movie. They don't go into any supernatural aspects in the trailer, aside from the little blue lights in the woods. I have a feeling there's more to the movie than the Disney Princess™ plotline they're showing us. I'd be willing to bet that that's mostly a misdirection.

The trailer does suck, tho.

I wish they hadn't bailed on Newt. That movie looked promising.

Saw La Luna today, the Oscar considered short that will be playing before Brave, and saw a presentation from the director, Enrico Casarosa. It's the longest Pixar short they've ever produced, there isn't much in the way of action, there's only three characters and two sets. And it rocks. It's beautiful, elegant, efficient storytelling, that barely strays from the original storyboards and animatics that were shown from the pitch. 

Any other studio, I would just say yeah, duh, the shorts get to go nuts since they're not producing a piece of work that's responsible to the "vast, interwoven, interacting, multivaried, multinational dominion of dollars". And it does sound like with La Luna they were given the chance to just sorta go off and make this thing. But these are the people that previously gave us that movie about the elderly man that had to float his damn house through the jungle with talking dogs to come to terms with his new life as a widower. They're familiar with chances.

I'm not privy to the specifics of decisions at the top of Disney•Pixar, but did something shift up top to make them have to work a little more conservatively at the feature level? Hope it's not that the chance that informs this project is just that it has a female lead.

Again, I'm reserving judgement on Brave until I see it, this is just the crap I'm thinking about since it's odd to be hearing such negative press about something that isn't coming out for so long.

Oh and VFX nerds: The amount of hand drawn and painted elements in La Luna is awesome. They printed out the UVs for the individual slats of the boat, painted them in watercolors, scanned them back in, and slapped them on geometry. Same for the matte paintings and the moon, just with pastels and stuff.

@Squiggly_P: Couldn't agree more. The ending of Wall-E was the turning point for me as well. They had a potentially amazing tragic ending there that was perfectly setup and didn't have the balls to go through with it (though I can live with it, it's still a damn good movie as far as I'm concerned). Up was great for about 15 minutes, but I think the rest of that movie is horribly over-rated, its in the bottom half of Pixar movies for me.

I've been holding out hope for adult animation to take foot in the US for over a decade now, and it just doesn't seem to be happening. Beowulf I don't really count because they just animated it to look live-action, so it doesn't even feel like an animated movie at all. The Final Fantasy movie ended up being garbage. The closest thing I can think of that I really liked was Titan A.E (saw it opening day). I guess there was A Scanner Darkly, but that was shot live action and rotoscoped, so I don't really count it either.

It doesn't help that all the movies I mentioned were financial failures, so maybe its just a problem with American audiences, but I still think they should give it another shot. If marketed properly, there's no reason a PG-13 rated 2d animated movie couldn't be successful here.