Usually movies are announced well in advance of their release, but Lucasfilm decided to surprise everyone today by revealing that it has a new animated movie coming out just over two months from now, on January 23rd. The film is called Strange Magic, and it's a musical with a story created by George Lucas himself — that'll make this film one of the more notable things that we've seen from Lucas lately. There still aren't a lot of details on what it'll be about, but the studio calls it a "madcap fairy tale" inspired by A Midsummer Night's Dream. The music in it will be composed of hits from the past six decades.

The film is directed by Gary Rydstrom, who previously wrote and directed the Toy Story short Hawaiian Vacation. George Lucas is also executive producing, and David Berenbaum, who wrote Elf, created the screenplay. It also has a really great voice cast, including Alan Cumming, Maya Rudolph, Alfred Molina, and Kristin Chenoweth, among others. It's hard to say what we should expect from a surprise, animated, musical fairy tale from Lucasfilm, of all places, but it certainly sounds like it'll be interesting to see more of. The first image from the film is below.