Mandy Moore is about to become a Disney character. The trades say she’s been chosen along with Chuck star Zachary Levi to provide voices for their upcoming take on Rapunzel.

The CG movie is a musical, a first really for the computer animated movie genre. The Ice Age mammals rarely break into song. About the closest computer animated movies have come to the song and dance of Disney’s 2D classics is the techno-dance numbers in Madagascar and, I’m pretty sure that doesn’t count. So it makes sense that they’d hire Mandy Moore, someone whose proven herself as a capable actress and, as a bonus, has a tremendous set of pipes.

Moore has been cast as the movie’s lead, the hair-dropping Rapunzel. Zachary Levi is the movie’s male lead, a dashing bandit stuck on the road with Rapunzel after she escapes imprisonment. Rapunzel is described as a “rebellious, teenage hair apparent”, who was kidnapped and taken from her parents as an infant. And of course, she has 70ft long, blonde hair which comes in handy when you don’t have a decent ladder.

The more we hear about Rapunzel the more it starts to seem like Disney’s really planning something special. That it’s a computer animated musical is different enough, but the look of the film is also nothing like any other CG movie you’ve seen before. If you’ve looked at any of the concept art we first showed you here then you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t get, clicking. The concept art is strictly 2D, with beautiful water color paintings for backgrounds in the style of classic, Disney, hand-drawn animation. It doesn’t look like concept art for any traditional CG movie, in fact it doesn’t look like a CG movie at all. Whatever Disney’s planning with Rapunzel, it’s shaping up to be unlike any other animated movie we’ve seen before.