Walt Disney Animation Studios, the group behind animated classics like The Little Mermaid (1989), The Lion King (1994), and newer blockbusters like Moana (2016), is set to debut its first VR short film next month at the SIGGRAPH 2018 conference in Vancouver.
The VR short film, titled Cycles, will be centered around a singular family home and the stories that happen therein, reports Variety. While Disney, a sprawling corporation, has experimented with VR across several divisions—Pixar’s Coco VR experience and Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire, to name a few—this will be the first VR short film to come from Walt Disney Animation Studios itself.
The film will be directed by Jeff Gibson, who has worked as a lightning artist at Disney Animation Studios since 2013. Variety reports that the studio took an experimental storyboarding approach, using motion capture and VR artwork tools like Quill to pre-visualize the film before starting into production proper.
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The film will debut at SIGGRAPH 2018 next month, but there’s no word yet on when it might see a public release.
