Matthew McConaughey, Scarlett Johansson, Reese Witherspoon Warm Up for Animated Musical Comedy ‘Sing’

The dulcet tones of Matthew McConaughey are capable of anything. They bring an easygoing charm to the variety of laid-back characters that he plays on film, they were almost able to gloss over the fact that nothing McConaughey was saying in those Lincoln commercials made a lick of sense, and they’ve surely sweet-talked many a barmaid at the end of the night as the local watering hole clears out. But McConcaughey’s molasses-smooth vocals will soon serve a novel purpose, one that the man has never considered before. Let’s dispense with the foreplay: the man’s gonna voice a cartoon koala bear.

Universal and Illumination Entertainment have pulled back the curtain on their upcoming project Sing, an animated musical-comedy about — what else? — the power of song. Setting a tentative release date of December 21, 2016, the studio most recently responsible for the inhumanity and suffering of Minions has secured a cast including Reese Witherspoon, Scarlett Johansson, Kingsman’s Taron Egerton, Seth MacFarlane, and pop starlet Tori Kelly. USA Today broke the news late last night, even going so far as to provide a plot synopsis as well as an outline of the attached talent. McCon is on as a “dapper” koala bear who works as the proprietor of a theater with fading greatness in the walls. In a last-ditch attempt to save the once-grand theater has loves so dearly, he stages a singing competition with his sheep pal (John C. Reilly) to drum up enthusiasm about the space. The contestant list is a real zoo: MacFarlane will voice a mouse, Kelly will give life to a “timid teenage elephant with a case of stage fright,” Egerton will play a street-wise gorilla, Witherspoon has signed on for a mother pig tending a brood of twenty-five little ones, and Johansson will portray a self-styled punk porcupine begin held back by her deadbeat boyfriend.

The upcoming film, which has been said to somehow contain eighty-five (that’s 8-5) songs, already faces a host of challenges. For one, wouldn’t a koala bear probably have an Australian accent? McConaughey’s unmistakably Texan vocals might seem a bit out of place, unless he puts on a voice for the character, but even that would seem wrong too. There is only McConaughey.