To say we're insanely jealous of SlashFilm's Brendon Connelly would be no understatement whatsoever. That's because the man got to go around Disney's Burbank Studio, to gather material for the site's special feature about the return of hand-drawn animation to the Walt Disney studio.

And he struck gold while he was there. He spoke to animation producer Peter Del Vecho, and asked what was coming up now that The Princess And The Frog was complete. Del Vecho confirmed that it's a full length Winnie The Pooh feature that's coming up next, which was already pretty much known, but then he dropped up that the project following that would be Snow Queen.

Snow Queen! This is a film that's been going at Disney before, and was being worked on the best part of a decade ago. When Glen Keane - a supervising animator across the likes of Treasure Planet, Tarzan, Beauty And The Beast and a whole lot more - left the project to work on something else at Disney, it seemed to indicate that all was not well. And eventually, the film quietly dropped off the Disney roster.

Now it appears that it's firmly back on, after many years of rumours, and this is simply terrific news. The excellent Always Animated blog has already noted Alan Menken's involvement on the musical side of things, and Snow Queen is very much the kind of fairy story that Disney traditionally worked with for its hand drawn movies.

A further bonus from Del Vecho came with the news that John Musker and Ron Clements, the directors of The Princess And The Frog, Aladdin, The Little Mermaid and many others, would also be starting a new project at Disney.

Find out more at SlashFilm here, and at Always Animated here.