Blue Sky Director Carlos Saldanha Wants to Try Live-Action

Veteran Blue Sky director Carlos Saldanha (Rio, Ice Age: The Meltdown, Rio 2) is currently in negotiations to take over the direction of 20th Century Fox’s sci-fi picture Rust. The film’s original director, Joe Cornish, recently left the production for unspecified reasons.

The E.T.-esque film, based on a recent graphic novel by Royden Lepp, is described by the Wrap as the story of “a family of farmers struggling in the wake of a devastating world war [whose] lives are changed when Jet Jones, a young boy with a jetpack, crashes into their barn while being pursued by a giant decommissioned war robot.”

Saldanha has been with Blue Sky since its earliest features. He co-directed the studio’s first two films—Ice Age and Robots. As animation fans, we can only hope that this is a mid-life crisis of the kind experienced by Andrew Stanton and Rob Minkoff, and that Saldanha will return to animation after getting the live-action bug out of his system. Because, seriously, what sane person would give up the opportunity to direct Ice Age 6?