Back in 2008, Disney Pixar announced that they were planning a film called Newt, which came with the synopsis "What happens when the last remaining male and female blue-footed newts on the planet are forced together by science to save the species, and they can’t stand each other?" Other Pixar projects developed around the same time have moved forward, with Monsters Inc. 2 and Cars 2 both set for release next year, but the only news on the Newt front came this past February when Disney's Floyd Norman said that the film was dead, but couldn't elaborate. Two months later it's now official: Newt is no more.

After noticing that the project had been deleted from the "Disney A to Z: The Official Encyclopedia" supplement, The Pixar Blog sent an email to Walt Disney Company archivist Dave Smith who responded by saying, "the film has been canceled." The film was to be director Gary Rydstrom's first feature after making his mark with the Pixar short film Lifted, which came out in 2006.

This is disappointing news. While it will be nice to see the characters from Toy Story, Cars and Monsters Inc. again, Pixar is a studio that has excelled in large part due to their original and imaginative plots and characters. They are the opposite of every other studio in the respect that they haven't relied on rehashing old ideas and, instead, test the water with new ones. Before Andrew Stanton's Wall-E or Pete Docter's Up arrived, we had no idea that kids would respond to a movie with next to zero dialogue or one about a crotchety octogenarian, but both made more than $200 million domestically. I look forward to the return of Buzz, Woody, Mike and Sully as much as the next person, but I'd rather see Pixar do what it does best.