The Anime/Cartoons & Comics Postwhoring Thread

[Masa]

J.J. Abrams' Bad Robot is Bringing Samurai Jack to the Big Screen?

Yea, you read that right. Hidden in an article on the Frederator Films blog (via Screen Rant) was an update about a Samurai Jack movie in development. But it might not be exactly what you're thinking. Years ago, New Line Cinema picked up the rights to Jack to make both an animated movie and a live-action movie, but that all fell apart. Now apparently the rights have ended up in the hands of none other than J.J. Abrams who is developing a feature animated movie that will combine traditional 2D animation with stereoscopic 3D. Sorry, it's not live-action. It's not in production yet, but it does sound like this one will actually happen.

The news comes hidden in a post written by Fred Seibert, former head of Hanna-Barbera and current head of Frederator Films, where he reports that Frederator had been granted the rights to an animated movie "as long as we agreed that Genndy would be intimately involved." Genndy Tartakovsky being the creator of Samurai Jack. So he had lunch with Genndy and got him on-board. "Here was the chance to finish what he'd started, and reclaim a special set of characters he'd created." The deals took forever to close, but in the end they got J.J. Abrams, a "huge Jack fan", to help co-produce via his Bad Robot along with Bryan Burk.

For those that don't know, Samurai Jack was an incredibly popular cartoon series that showed on Cartoon Network from 2001 to 2004. The plots of individual episodes range from dark and epic to light-hearted and comic, but typically follow Jack in his singular quest to find a method of traveling back in time. Many of the battle scenes in the series are reminiscent of samurai films, and since Jack's robotic enemies "bleed" oil or electricity and monsters/aliens bleed slime or goo, the series is able to exhibit the action of these films while avoiding censorship for violence. It's all very early, but this should be exciting news for Samurai Jack fans.

http://www.firstshowing.net/2009/11/24/jj-abrams-bad-robot-is-bringing-samurai-jack-to-the-big-screen/

[Masa]

Mamoru Oshii Developing a Live-Action Tetsujin 28 Movie

Anime and manga fans should be excited by this news. Anime News Network (via SlashFilm) is reporting that acclaimed Japanese director Mamoru Oshii (of Ghost in the Shell and The Sky Crawlers animes) is directing a live-action version of the Tetsujin 28-go manga. I'm guessing that most Americans don't know anything about Tetsujin 28-go, but it's one of the most popular and beloved mangas in Japanese history. The story is about a three-stories-tall giant remote controlled robot named Tetsujin 28 that also "inspired" the 1964 anime series Gigantor. Most people will probably recognize the Tetsujin 28 design seen above.

Imagi Animation, the studio behind TMNT and Astro Boy, is also developing a Gigantor CGI movie called T28 (which is a shortened version of the Tetsujin 28 title). You can see an early teaser trailer for that right here. As I mentioned earlier, Tetsujin 28 is very popular, and now we're going to see a live-action version, too. The ANN doesn't say much else about the project besides that Mamoru Oshii directed a stage version of Tetsujin 28 that featured a 1,100 pound, 20-foot-tall replica of the robot. And they unveiled a 59-foot-tall statue in Kobe, Japan earlier this year. I'd love to see him fighting live-action, it could be pretty awesome.

Tetsujin 28-go is a Japanese manga first published in 1956 written and illustrated by Mitsuteru Yokoyama, who also created Giant Robo. The series centred on the adventures of a young boy named Shotaro Kaneda, who controlled a giant robot named Tetsujin 28, built by his late father. I'm not too familiar with Tetsujin 28-go or Gigantor, but I am interested in seeing this project come together. I'm a big anime fan and I love the robot design and would love to see this as live-action. I'm just wondering if Oshii will get a big enough budget to actually make this look good? They've got a long way to go if they want to live up to ILM's robots.

http://www.firstshowing.net/2009/12/27/mamoru-oshii-developing-a-live-action-tetsujin-28-go-movie/

[Fushigidane]

I started watching Gundam today

[Masa]

Anime decade: From 'Japan Cool' to 'cooling off'

Matt Alt asks, how did Japan's national artistic treasure -- animation -- go from boom to bust during the first decade of the 21st century?

I will admit it: I was a teenaged anime fanatic. Encounters with anime classics in the 1970s and 1980s ignited a fascination with Japanese language and culture that drew me to the country, first as a tourist, then as a student and now as a resident. This personal journey makes reading -- and writing about -- the industry's recent stumbles all the more poignant.

I was surprised and shocked to witness the rise of anime in the 1990s, and now I feel those same emotions again as I watch it collapse in slow motion. Truly, the early 2000s timeline reads like the plot of an epic novel with an appropriately apocalyptic anime ending.

Here is a timeline of the last decade's greatest developments in anime.

2000: Thanks to a string of international successes in the mid-1990s, including hits like "Pokémon," "Gundam Wing," "Dragonball," and "Sailor Moon," Japan's anime industry finds itself enjoying unprecedented success both domestically and abroad. The majority of shows created for male anime fans are sci-fi epics, many featuring heroes piloting giant robots or protagonists who are robots themselves.

2001: American journalist Douglas McGray dubs Japan "a cultural superpower," while coining the phrase "gross national cool" to describe the outsized influence of Japanese entertainment. "Cowboy Bebop," a hip sci-fi series about bounty hunters in space, debuts on the US Cartoon Network's Adult Swim, creating new legions of foreign anime fans.

2002: Hayao Miyazaki's "Spirited Away" wins an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, the first time the American film industry so recognizes an anime.

2003: The Wachovski Brothers commission a series of nine anime short films based on their smash-hit Matrix films. Dubbed "The Animatrix," it becomes one of the top selling anime titles abroad that year. Meanwhile, Quentin Tarantino incorporates a flashy anime sequence into "Kill Bill, Vol. 1."

2005: Just as foreign audiences are warming up to the idea that animated fare isn't just for kids, Japan's anime industry throws them a curve ball. The success of the novel and television series "Densha Otoko" -- an alleged "true story" about an otaku who gets up the nerve to ask out a "normal" woman he encounters on the train during his daily commute -- legitimizes and empowers the local otaku community. This in turn leads to more and more animated series aimed squarely at their demographic. Because said demographic consists almost entirely of eternally single, socially awkward men, their tastes tend towards wish-fulfillment fantasy plots starring beautiful young lolitas -- who are willing to hang out with eternally single, socially awkward men. This fetishization of girlish naiveté and innocence is known as "moé," and it will dictate the industry's path for the remainder of the decade. Critics, however, believe that the development will potentially hamper Japan's ability to export anime, as the moé concept comes across as utterly creepy to most foreign audiences.

2006: The industry achieves peak revenues of ¥241.5 billion per year. More animated fare is being created than ever before. In spite of this apparent success, it becomes public that a third of people working in the anime industry make less than ¥1 million a year -- a poverty-level wage.

2007 - 2008: The first visible cracks appear in anime's hip facade. An overabundance of anime made purely for anime fans (rather than for the traditional demographic of children and teenagers) knocks down the average profits per title as hastily-animated niche productions flood the market. Anonymous complaints from industry insiders incensed at atrocious pay and working conditions continue to mount. More and more of the basic work needed to train the next generation, such as "in-betweeing" (the grunt work of animating the many intermediate cels between the key frames) is farmed out to second- and even third-world countries -- including by some reports, North Korea. This results in a serious hollowing out of the industry's future talent pool. Meanwhile in the United States, the number of anime shows airing in the television marketplace drops dramatically.

2009: The types of anime shows popular among Japanese and foreign fans continues to diverge. The most buzz-worthy domestic fare are super-niche moé and lolicon shows brimming with inside jokes and anime stereotypes that few other than dyed-in-the-wool otaku can decipher. In Japan, a poll conducted by the otaku matchmaking service Otakuma reveals that four out of five of the top shows watched by female anime fans are about giant robots, while four out of five of the top shows watched by male anime fans are about little girls.

While anime created for kids is on the wane, the debut of a life-sized, 18-meter tall life-sized version of the iconic 1970s robot hero Mobile Suit Gundam in a Tokyo park is greeted by some four million nostalgic fans over the course of its display. Many are grown fans who bring their children to see the thirty year old character. Meanwhile, in a Japanese radio interview, director Mamoru Oshii publicly admits that he was forced to use computers to animate his latest film "Sky Crawlers," because there simply "aren't enough animators out there to let us do everything hand-drawn. They're not around anymore." The general feeling is that Japan may not be able to sustain its anime industry in the coming years. What will the second decade of the 21st century have in store for this Japanese pop art form? Check back with CNNGo in 2020, and we'll let you know.

http://www.cnngo.com/tokyo/play/decade-anime-682165

[thatonezombie]

WHAT DOES THIS ALL MEAN?!?!?!?!

[sousora]

Otakuma reveals that four out of five of the top shows watched by female anime fans are about giant robots, while four out of five of the top shows watched by male anime fans are about little girls.

From the teenagers I teach, the majority of the girls are into the male action shows: Bleach, Reborn etc, but certainly not giant robots. The boys are still largely into the "monster" genre, things like Monster Hunter and even Pokemon are still popular amongst my 15 year old nerds Guess they need a few more years before they descend into little girl anime

[Asmodai]

I did find that part pretty ironic honestly.

[sousora]

I've been thinking about the same thing that article is on about myself lately. Ever since actually moving to Japan, I've been watching less and less anime, and I was wandering why that was. It's all around me now, I have an anime-dedicated channel (amongst anime on regular channels), I live a three minute walk from the nearest entirely manga/anime dedicated shop. Yet I very, very rarely read or watch anything these days. Not to say I don't, but a whole lot less than usual.

Is it growing up? Or is it, as the article suggests, that more and more anime is just being targetted to those very specific otaku and no one else? I'd like to think the second, because if all my toys and other nerdy crap are anything to go by, I don't think growing up is the problem! There seems to be less and less awesome, original anime and more and more stuff that just repeats the last terrible show because it already has a built-in fanbase that comes with money.

I miss the old days when there was so much discovery to be had.

[Aioros]

Growing up must be a part of it since I've been through that phase too. Also, maybe because my attention span got lower as I got older.

I was pretty much addicted to anime high-school going to college but after graduating I barely had time to read manga or watch any new shows, but I still try to follow some of the series that I have really liked (Gundam, Hajime no Ippo, Detective Conan). I think Lucky Star has been one of the most enjoyable shows I've watched since I could easily relate to the jokes. I started watching Haruhi before but I found it confusing.

Back in the days, anime could turn non-fans into fans. I remember one of our Christian Living teachers borrowing VHS tapes of Evangelion from us. With the currently releases, I have to agree that they are geared towards specific otakus and they are just trying to maintain the fanbase they've created; It's the fanservice that's selling the show. A lot of ero-games turned anime are quite popular these days but unless you played the game, I think it'll be difficult to appreciate those kinds of shows. I also feel that the disease of hentai anime has started to rub off to the mainstream ones; they have become repetitive. Also, there are some shows that they should have ended when they had the chance.

The giant robot shows that girls watched last year was probably Gundam 00. I watched that series too and it has one of the better stories in the recent Gundam shows. Mech designs were cool and character-wise, the Mesiters and the rest of the cast were good, but I think they were made to look bishie to attract female viewers. And looks like it worked.

[Ichigo_Pantsu]

I'm still patiently waiting for the fate stay night movie, as well as the continuation of hajime no ippo new challenger 

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[BigDnm01]

has the dvd for Eden of the East (Higashi no Eden) movie 1: The King of Eden been released yet?  I'd been waiting for it.

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