For San Francisco film lovers, we are pleased to present this story from “The Moving Picture.”

William Shatner, Chris Pine, James Earl Jones and Hayden Christensen have signed on to lend their voices to Quantum Quest, the independently financed 3-D animated film being made in conjunction with NASA, say the trades.

The voice cast also includes Samuel L. Jackson, Amanda Peet, Jason Alexander, Sandra Oh, Mark Hamill, Abigail Breslin, Spencer Breslin and Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong.

Directed by Dan St. Pierre and Harry Kloor, Quest centers on Dave (Pine), a photon who lives in the sun and who is drawn into a galactic battle between the Core (Shatner) and the Void (Hamill).

The film interweaves animated sequences rendered by Digimax with actual space imagery captured from seven ongoing space missions. The pic was initiated by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory as part of the outreach program of the Cassini Huygens space mission in 1996.

It’s scheduled to open first in IMAX and subsequently in conventional theaters in late 2009.

[Thank you for reading SFLuxe.com. This article was published today by The Moving Picture. We hope you enjoyed it!]