‘Simpsons Movie’ Director David Silverman To Direct Chinese-Financed Feature ‘Extinct’

China Lion Entertainment will co-produce and co-finance a new animated feature, Extinct, to be helmed by David Silverman, who has previously directed The Simpsons Movie and co-directed Pixar’s Monsters, Inc.

Silverman, a seminal figure on The Simpsons since its earliest days as a series of shorts on The Tracey Ullman Show, is being joined on the project by Simpsons writers Joel Cohen, John Frink, and Rob LaZebnik.

According to Variety, which first reported the news, Extinct is a fantasy film that tells the story of an “adorable species of fluffy animals” called flummels. After a couple of time-travelling flummels discover that they’ve gone extinct in the contemporary era, they travel back in time to save their species from extinction.

China Film has tentatively set a first quarter 2020 release date for the film.