SNAPSHOT
Lava will tell the story of a curmudgeonly volcano, Uku, and his hot top love interest across the sea, the mountain Lele.
(synopsis via Huffington Post)
Who doesn’t want someone to “lava”?
We all do right, even volcano islands who they might be situated out in the middle of the ocean heartily subscribe to John Donne’s poetically-evocative sentiment that “No man is an island/Entire of itself”.
Uku may look old and crusty, a creation of the powerful forces that have shaped our entire planet but that doesn’t mean that a beating warm heart doesn’t beat down in the midst of all the magma.
He is, in fact, in love with Lele, a mountain just across the way, and spends quite an amount of time pursuing her as this statement from Disney via the LA Times makes clear:
“Inspired by the isolated beauty of tropical islands and the explosive allure of ocean volcanoes, Lava is a musical love story that takes place over millions of years.”
Lava, which will premiere for a select few at the Hiroshima International Animation Festival in August, and will precede Pixar’s next original feature movie Inside Out which opens in USA on June 19, 2015, was inspired by director James Ford Murphy’s honeymoon in Hawai’i 20 years ago.
And like many of Pixar’s innovative short films, which are required to push the envelope of what is technologically possible so the techniques can be used in future feature releases, it wears its heart very much on its sleeve as Huffington Post points out:
“Pixar loves a good romance story, and the animation studio certainly tells them well, especially in quick doses. Its theatrical shorts — from Tin Toy (the first computer-animated short film to win an Oscar) to last year’s The Blue Umbrella — capture something about humanity often missed in the breadth of longer films.”
Featuring a love song “Lava,” which Murphy wrote and performed to Pixar executives as part of his pitch for the film – Hawaiian recording artists Kuana Torres Kahele and Napua Greig do the honours on the film’s official version of the song – Lava looks like it will another stellar addition to Pixar’s heartwarming, insightful and just plain gorgeous line of impressive short films.
