Here’s the best news out of the Cannes Film Festival’s open market so far: Laika, the animation studio best known for making movies you’ll actually want to watch with your children like Kubo and the Two Strings and Coraline, revealed new details about their upcoming Spring 2019 release at the Festival on Tuesday (May 8). And it turns out, like most of their output, we really can’t wait to see what they have in store for us.
As you’ve probably guessed, given the title of this post, Laika has made a Bigfoot movie (though other sites like Screencrush have referred to it as a ‘yeti’, which we’re not sure is totally accurate), titled Missing Link, directed by Paranorman reanimator Chris Butler and starring Hugh Jackman, Zoe Saldana, and Zach Galifiankis as the titular monster. Yes, that is one hell of a voice cast, and it’s the perfect synthesis of the cast members of 2009’s biggest blockbuster movies. Missing Link is produced and distributed by Megan Ellison’s Annapurna Pictures, who have a pretty damn solid track record.
According to Variety, the plot of the film centers “on the charismatic Sir Lionel Frost (Jackman) who sets out to prove the existence of a legendary creature the Missing Link (Galifianakis), a soulful beast who, as the last of his kind, is rather lonely.” This also accompanies a quote from studio CEO and Nike founder’s son Chris Knight saying that Missing Link is “something we’ve never tried before: a raucous comedy entwined with a swashbuckling epic underscoring the universal need to find belonging[,]” which actually excellently describes every single Laika movie that has come before it.
So, yeah! That’s pretty exciting. You can take a first look at the film in the featured image above, which shows Galifianakis’ character hiding behind a bunch of trees. Talk about a teaser image!
Missing Link hits theaters in the spring of 2019.
Featured image via Laika, via Variety.