Director Peggy Holmes led a presentation of new footage from Chancethe first animated feature from Apple Original Films and Skydance Animation as part of their overall deal, Tuesday at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival.
Slated to debut August 5 on Apple TV+, the story follows Sam Greenfield, voiced by Eva Noblezada, who is described as the unluckiest person alive. In the first clip, everything about her morning goes wrong, including her toast landing on the floor. In another clip, she follows a mysterious black cat, voiced by Simon Pegg, in the land of luck who looks like a perfectly timed Rube Goldberg machine in which everything goes smoothly.
“Sam is super generous of heart; the unluckiest girl in the world is looking for luck for someone else. And on this journey, Sam discovers that the worst bad luck she’s had in her life has actually led her to the luckiest thing of her life. That’s really what it’s all about,” said Holmes, an Emmy winner whose credits include Secret of the wings and The pirate fairyrecount The Hollywood Reporter. She directed from a screenplay by Kiel Murray (Cars).
Dragons are a symbol of good luck in some parts of the world, thus inspiring The Dragon, the CEO of Good Luck, who appeared in another clip and is voiced by Jane Fonda. “We built it into the process of the story,” says Holmes. “As she looked at the drawings, saw the shapes, and saw how the artists had drawn the dragon, you could see her begin to capture those moments and put the character into her body. At that meeting, Jane said, ” She’s 12 meters tall, she’s got this long tail, she should wrap it around her body like a boa.”
The voice cast is also led by Whoopi Goldberg as Captain in Lucky Land and John Ratzenberger as Rootie.
To get the Luck Land look, Holmes says she spoke with production designer Fred Warter “about this idea of good luck and bad luck. I wanted to create a magical land of luck, where the luck that we experience every day in our lives is actually created. Fred made the first work of art, with two worlds, on either side of a coin. Good luck up and bad luck down. And that was it.
From there, they further developed the look of the character’s environment. “If you live somewhere where there’s only luck, you don’t need guardrails, you don’t need security…just green lights, all the time. And then you do the opposite with bad luck. There are scaffolding. Nothing works.
For Holmes, Chance demonstrates “who we all are at Skydance – telling deep, emotional stories, creating a world you’ve never seen before, and making a movie for everyone.”
John Lasseter, David Ellison, Dana Goldberg and David Eisenmann produce Chance.