By our memory - which, we concede, isn't the most reliable tool in the box - the cancellation of Pixar's planned movie Newt is the first time that a publicly-announced project from the firm has been put into turnaround. And while Pixar never made a massive song and dance about it (its policy of letting its films pretty much speak for themselves remains an admirable one), it's nonetheless kept details of any previous projects that have failed to make it to the big screen behind closed doors before.

Likewise, even though it's inevitably got lots of productions in the works, there are only three features we officially know about: Cars 2, Brave, and Monsters, Inc 2.

Given the fact, however, that Pixar does tend to keep things mum (Newt's cancellation was, after all, rumoured for some time before it got any kind of official confirmation), it's surprising, but intriguing, to see that it's released a bunch of stills from Newt onto Facebook. In fact, it's pretty much unheard of anyway, for so much art from a cancelled animation production to get to see the light of day.

Most of it is concept art from the film, and from what we can make of it, there's a small element of the underappreciated A Bug's Life to the look of the movie (or at least A Bug's Life with the benefit of another decade or so of technological advances). Yet, this was nonetheless clearly a movie very much with an identity of its own.

There's some lovely artwork from the film that's been released, and we've put some of it together here for you. You can find the rest at Facebook right here.

As for what Newt was and why it was canned? The first part of the question is easier. Newt was originally announced back in 2008, with the idea being to release the movie in 2012. The story was set to be about the last two blue-footed newts on the planet, who have to come together and mate to ensure the survival of the species (given the joys of presenting ‘mating' to a family audience, it's probably wise that Pixar chose newts for the project).

Inevitably, the two aren't the best of chums, and are very different characters. And you could probably map out where all this would have gone right now (although we'll never get to see if we were right).

The movie was set to be the feature directorial debut of Gary Rydstrom (who, of course, has an army of sound design credits to his name, as well as having directed the Pixar short Lifted). Rydstrom is now understood to be working on alternative projects instead.

Truthfully, though, while Newt was a film we were keen to see, its outline did make it sound one of the less interesting Pixar productions. But we're interested now if the reasons why the film didn't make it to the screen will ever be revealed. We'd imagine it's something as straightforward as the production simply not working, but it'd be interesting to find out more. As things stand, the only part of the project that made it to film was a brief visual reference in Toy Story 3.

For now, then, at least we've got this terrific selection of art, which we'll leave you to gaze at and imagine the Pixar movie that ultimately never was.