Disney has released a new poster for Brave, the upcoming feature from Pixar.  There are several impressive elements prominently featured on the new one sheet, including the atmospheric animated setting and the central placement of Princess Merida, the first heroine ever to star in a Pixar feature.  Perhaps the most impressive thing here is Merida's frizzy head of incredible red hair, which looks like another sublime technical accomplishment from the preeminent animation studio.

Nobody likes being the subject of embarrassing or potentially damaging rumors, particularly when those rumors involve assertions that their own professional inexperience led directly to an excessive production on a major motion picture.  For the last half a year, stories have circulated suggesting that next month's John Carter was a money-hemorrhage for Disney, and that director Andrew Stanton's live action debut ended up costing almost twice as much as its original, already hefty, price tag.  Naturally, Stanton and his producers are looking to clarify the process and have denied those rumors.

Not only does Pixar generally provide top notch feature films, but the preeminent animation studio in the world also insists on running short films before every feature presentation.  These shorts are not only the perfect primer for films like WALL-E, Toy Story, Up, or Finding Nemo, but more often than not, they're perfect bite-sized little works of art that stand on their own.  La Luna is the latest upcoming Pixar short film, and with around four months until we'll be able to see the whole thing, a new thirty-second clip has arrived online.

Awards season rolls on, and it's looking more and more like Rango is going to take the cake in the animated feature category at the big show, the Oscar ceremony on February 26th.  The first animated feature for both director Gore Verbinski and legendary visual effects house Industrial Light & Magic just fairly well swept the feature categories at the 2012 Annie Awards, celebrating the very best of animation across different media.

The Big News: Now that it has an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature, this Friday Paramount Pictures will theatrically re-release Rango, the animated feature from Pirates of the Caribbean director Gore Verbinski and star Johnny Depp.  The Fine Print: the re-release is a one-week only exclusive engagement at a single theater, the outstanding ArcLight Hollywood on Sunset Boulevard here in sunny Los Angeles.

With just one critical misstep out of twelve theatrical features, Pixar has a formidable track record, so interest in future projects from the animation studio inspire no end of curiosity.  Accordingly, the folks up in Emeryville, California are very, very good at keeping the content of their forthcoming films very secret. 

In the case of writer-director Pete Docter's next effort, we knew nothing until three months ago, at which point we knew slightly less than nothing.  Now though, our most substantial idea of the film comes thanks to a quick, one-line summary explaining that the as-yet untitled feature from the director of Up and Monsters Inc will take place in the mind of a young girl, with all the characters representing specific emotions.

After months of keeping surprisingly quiet, Disney has opened up the nascent marketing campaign for John Carter, the studio's hugely-budgeted science fiction epic that is being positioned as the start to a franchise adapting the massively influential Barsoom novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs.  Last week, we saw a full theatrical trailer and a series of banner posters.  Now that Disney is beginning to sell the film in earnest, its co-writer and director Andrew Stanton is talking a bit about two potentially sore subjects.  The first is the film's title, which is being widely criticized as bland enough that it will fail to intrigue general audiences.  The second is the production's extensive reshoot period, which Stanton explains as part of an intuitive and healthy process.

Disney has released a full length theatrical trailer for Brave, the next effort from Pixar Animation Studios.  Like the teaser trailer that premiered over the summer, this one includes plenty of atmospheric, beautiful environments, but it also takes the time to introduce the major characters and a truly stunning head of curly red hair.  That head of hair belongs the Princess Merida, the first full-on heroine in Pixar's history, a princess whose independent streak and determination to buck tradition lead to an adventure across the Scottish highlands.  This Brave trailer showcases Merida and her royal family, as well as her basic dilemma, but the actual story remains fairly mysterious; we do get a few glimpses of a fearsome bear featured in the film's original title, The Bear and the Bow.  Plenty of looks at the bow, too, as Merida is the finest archer around.

The ending of Toy Story 3 and the glorious emotional backhand it represented seemed like a natural closure point for Pixar's flagship franchise, but it also left the door open for continued adventures of Woody, Buzz Lightyear, and the whole ensemble.  While it remains to be seen whether Toy Story 4 will ever actually happen, Pixar has kept the toys alive with Toy Story Toons, shorts created to precede Disney features, hopefully applying some residual goodwill to the film that follows.  Today, the studio has released a thirty-second clip from the next Toon, entitled Small Fry, which finds Buzz Lightyear stranded in a fast food restaurant.

Disney has released a new image from Pixar's next release, the fairy tale adventure Brave, which is unique in that it's a rare original effort in an increasingly sequel-oriented release schedule from the animation studio.  The last two Pixar movies, Toy Story 3 and Cars 2, represented first a critical high for the studio, while the second was instead a critical low point, and Brave will hopefully wash away the taste of Cars 2 before Monsters University comes along in 2013.  Brave is, rather surprisingly, the first ever Pixar film to feature a female protagonist, Princess Merida, Scottish royalty who aspires to be an archer.  When she defies an ancient custom and unspecified things go askew, she must go on an adventure across the Highlands to make right what she has wronged.