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 JohanssonKingsman’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.

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