Hear Uku the Volcano Sing in Sneak Peek of Pixar’s ‘Lava’

For a year without a Pixar film, there has been quite a bit of Pixar news recently. Today, Yahoo! Movies released an exclusive sneak peak from Pixar’s new short Lava in which we get to hear the main character, a volcano named Uku, sing!

The animation is simply beautiful and almost photo-realistic at times; for example, the way the volcano’s smoke billows up was particularly impressive. The animation of Uku’s face is also quite pleasant for a rock-hard mountain that typically shouldn’t move with such ease.

In the article, Lava‘s director James Ford Murphy talked about the animation limitations he faced in creating the short, specifically creating the feeling of movement around the almost stagnant volcano, Uku. To do this, they created movement around him with dolphins, clouds, birds, lava and swooping camera angles. You can definitely see the movement in the clip above, notably the panning camera and the beautiful time-lapsed scene of the clouds moving all around him.

Murphy also talks about how Uku’s face was created by blending “the faces of Kuahna Torres Kahele, the musician who is the voice of the mountain; Honeymooners star Jackie Gleeson, and the bulldog in the Chuck Jones animated classic ‘Feed the Kitty.‘” Murphy considers Feed the Kitty to perhaps be his all-time favorite cartoon because of how much heart and humor it has, so it was a bit inspiration for him and his team.

Lava will hit theatres on June 19, 2015 and will play before Inside Out.