There are two schools of thought in modern animated filmmaking.
The first is to create characters that audiences will love, and then find the right voice actors to portray them. The second is to hire well-known actors audiences already love, and put their voices into your movie. The former is the method used by the likes of Pixar and Aardman. The latter is what pretty much everybody else does, with a few noteworthy exceptions.
Such seems to be the case for The Angry Birds Movie, from Sony Pictures and mobile game developer Rovio. The game's main characters such as Red, Chuck (the yellow one) and Bomb Bird (the big black one) get actual bodies for the movie and personalities to go with them.
Sony has posted the first trailer for the movie, which you can see below. But we think you'll find that the cast is what gets the most attention, despite never seeing them on screen. The Angry Birds Movie stars Jason Sudeikis as grumpy Red, who (you guessed it) has anger management issues. Everyone's favorite snowman Josh Gad appears as wacky Chuck. And Danny McBride is an oafish Bomb with a bodily control problem. The furious fowl also count Maya Rudolph (Matilda, the white one), Peter Dinklage (the Mighty Eagle), Kate McKinnon (unknown, but we're guessing Stella), Tony Hale (unknown) and Keegan-Michael Key (unknown) among their numbers.
Of course, no movie is complete without an antagonist, and Angry Birds has a built-in group of villains. Sony nabbed Bill Hader to play a bad piggy named Leonard, who appears to have been invented for the movie. The movie is said to depict the first fateful meeting between birds and pigs, explaining why the birds are so angry.
Will Angry Birds transcend its video game origins and become something more? Or is this gimmicky game ill-suited for the big screen? You decide.
The Angry Birds Movie will be in theaters on July 1, 2016.
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