I’m absolutely dating myself here, but I remember when there was a time when major animated films weren’t completely riddled with major Hollywood stars. I mean, the big names for, say, Transformers: The Movie were Leonard Nimoy, Robert Stack, and Orson Welles, and this wasn’t anywhere near the prime of the career of any of these gents. But what mattered was these lower-wattage guys were well-suited for the respective characters they were assigned to so I didn’t spend half the film picking out who was who, and I just sat back and enjoyed the proceedings at hand.

These days, it seems like it’s much more about what major actors have a break between movies or seasons of their TV show and want to pick up a nice check for a few days of work. I don’t begrudge them for doing it, but I wish that studios would follow the Pixar model of putting more emphasis on who’s right for a part rather than how many big names we can get on a poster.  Today brings news of a new animated film from an indie studio, Snoot Entertainment, that’s attempting to bring the production cost of CG movies way down to a fraction of the price. But one area they’re not cutting corners on is in casting notable names. But as you’ll see from the list below, it seems like they’re picking some good ones, rather than hot ones in terms of voice talent.

Terra, which based on a 2003 short film about peaceful aliens on a distant planet, has already landed Ron Perlman, Danny Glover, Brian Cox, David Cross, James Garner, Danny Trejo, Rosanna Arquette, and Evan Rachel Wood for voice roles. Now they just added Dennis Quaid, Justin Long, Amanda Peet, Chris Evans, and Luke Wilson. Terra is Snoot’s going to be completely financing the film, and they’ll look for distribution channels afterward, which is increasingly the way it gets done these days. I don’t know what the finished product will look like, but with the gems they’ve picked so far for voices, it should sound great.