I’m not entirely sure why Akira needs a live action movie made by Hollywood, the manga and 1982 animated film were quite enough to satisfy me. But at least they’re attaching some cool names to this project.

After a post-PAX hiatus due to life/work/aliens invading, Weeaboo Wednesday returns with a vengeance… at 11:15pm PST. It’s still technically Wednesday, right?

Ahh fall season… so many shows, so little time to watch them all. Regardless, I’ve done my best to watch everything from the new fall season that looks even remotely interesting, and I’m here to tell you what’s worth watching and what’s worth skipping. This week’s Weeaboo Wednesday will be a quick list, but you can expect the next couple weeks to cover, in depth, my top picks for this season, as well as my thoughts on what was great from the summer season. So go ahead and hit the break to check out my hit and miss list for all the newest shows, and feel free to follow along on the always-wonderful Chartfag’s season chart. (please click the header image for the full chart).

I’ll admit, I’ve played a lot of eroge. You know, eroge. Those weird Japanese visual novels that usually end in dirty pictures? Yeah, go ahead and scoff, I’m used to it. Anyway, I came across this video and had to share it with my fellow whores. The sheer genius (or insanity) of the plot makes me want to buy 100 copies. Plus the fact that they censor anything remotely phallic… Suffice it to say, I need to play My Girlfriend Is The President. You need to play My Girlfriend Is The President. The entire world needs to play My Girlfriend Is The President. Unfortunately, it’s only slated for a Japanese release, but hopefully something this unique will eventually get fansubbed.

If you didn’t already know Leonardo DiCaprio and his production company, Appian Way have been trying for a little while now to bring an American remake of Katsuhiro Otomos classic anime, Akira to the big screen.  Various writers have worked on the script of the past couple of years with nobody ever permanently on the project, this morning the guys over at Collider have found out that Iron Man and Children of Men scribes Mark Fergus & Hawk Ostby.

Two big pieces of Gundam news have come out of the Gundam Big Expo event in Tokyo. Gundam Unicorn, which I talked about yesterday, has been confirmed as an OVA series. There will be six episodes, each one clocking in at fifty minutes. The series will have a simultaneous worldwide launch next spring, as confirmed by Bandai Visual. Gundam Unicorn will be released on DVD and Blu-ray and shown at events. The fact that Gundam Unicorn is an OVA is not surprising, and was in fact expected. This news means that there is still no announced Gundam TV series, which means we probably won’t see a new series this fall. Hit the jump to see the other major announcement from Gundam Big Expo.

With Mobile Suit Gundam 00 ending last March, it was only a matter of time before Sunrise released a new Gundam series. Let’s face it, the franchise practically prints money, and the rabid fanbase (myself included) eat it up. With that in mind, Sunrise is adapting the popular Gundam Unicorn novels into an anime, which is scheduled to be released this winter. Gundam Unicorn is set in the Universal Century (UC) timeline, which for you non-Gundam fans is the continuity that includes the original Mobile Suit Gundam and its sequels. Gundam Unicorn takes place in the year UC0096, three years after the events of Mobile Suit Gundam: Char’s Counterattack. Harutoshi Fukui, author of the novels, has said that the anime adaptation will follow the original story very closely, describing it as a “reconstruction” rather than a simple adaptation. Though Sunrise has not announced whether Gundam Unicorn will run as a TV series or an OVA series, Fukui did say that the first episode clocks in at about an hour, which leads us to believe that we’re looking at an OVA series.

The Blu-ray Disc Association, which sounds like a fancy name for some sort of media disc mafia, recently conducted an online survey of what anime titles Japanese consumers would purchase on Blu-Ray. The results are mostly unremarkable, with most modern popular anime making an appearance. However, the question itself got me thinking about what American releases I’d purchase on Blu-ray. A huge benefit of the format is its massive storage size, and one excellent use of Blu-ray would be to put entire series on just one or two discs. A standard dual-layer Blu-ray can hold 50GB of data, compared to a DVD-9’s 8.54GB. One of my pet peeves of purchasing anime on DVD is the massive amount of DVDs you need to hold all the episodes. For example, a 12 episode series like The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya takes 4 DVDs, and that’s a lot of space on my bookshelf. That’s reason enough for me to want anime on Blu-ray, not to mention full HD releases as well. Even if switching to Blu-ray would raise prices slightly, I’d be all for it. However, I don’t see a complete conversion happening anytime in the near future, as DVDs are still the media format of choice for most people.

Today, Kenji Kamiyama, director of such anime as Blood: The Last Vampire, Ghost In The Shell: SAC, and Eden of the East, announced that Eden of the East will have a compilation film released a month before the movie sequel. For those who don’t know, Eden of the East was a total sleeper hit from the spring that came out of nowhere. There was some hype, but Eden of the East went above and beyond, making it one of the best shows so far this year (containing one of the best anime openings I’ve seen in years, check it out above). However, Eden of the East only ran for a short 11 episodes and left everyone wanting more, allowing for the creation of a double film sequel. If you haven’t seen Eden of the East, you can wait for Funimation’s US release later this year or get your grubby hands on the fandub through less “legitimate” means…

Anyway, the important thing to note is the news from today about a compilation film. The trend of comp films has been around for a long time in anime, and fans have mixed feelings on both sides of the issue. There are some examples of comp movies done right, like Gundam 0079’s infinitely better 3 movie version and Macross: Do You Believe In Love, but both of these films are based on series with 35+ episodes. In the case of Eden of the East, I don’t believe that we need a compilation movie since there is only eleven episodes. The creation of a comp movie for such a short series looks like nothing more than a cheap, greedy way to cash in on Eden of the East’s popularity. Here’s the sad thing: I’ll probably still watch it.

Marvel at SDCC this weekend, decided to finally share with us the new ‘anime’ versions of two of its hottest franchises at the moment, those being Iron Man and Wolverine. These are only the first two of the four anime that Marvel has decided to make. The good news is that the animation is done by Madhouse (Paprika) and is bound to be good, the bad news is that the Japanese have a weird view of how Wolverine should look. PR and movie poster and additional video after the jump.

Yesterday Microsoft announced that they are teaming with five production house for a series of seven short films entitled; Halo Legends.  Shinji Aramaki, director of Appleseedand Appleseed Ex Machina will be overseeing production on the short films which are set to be released on Xbox Live and the new Halo web portal; Halo Waypoint with DVD and other digital distribution planned for later.  This project reminds me a lot of the awesome Matrix side project; The Animatrix which had lots of little short stories written and directed by different people all with a slightly different style.  If they can pull off something half as good that Halo fans should be in for a treat when they debut later on this year.

(*note*: Admittedly, I am a humongous Macross fanboy so it will come as no surprise how glowing this review is.)

I was a child of the 80s and with that came exposure to a little show that many of us always think about when we talk about Anime in America in that time period. I am, of course, referring that Harmony Gold production that took 3 individual Anime series and smooshed them together with a tenuous storyline…Robotech.

Ok so for the last couple of days, I’ve been ok watching really disturbing images first thing in the morning combined with great metal tracks. Today’s wont’ be any different. If you’ve never seen Neon Genesis Evangelion’s movie End of Evangelion then you’ve missed out one one of the biggest mind fucks that Japan has ever shared with America.

The track you hear is from Slipknot’s self-titled album and is known merely as “Surfacing”. It’s a pretty fitting track considering that the premise of End of Evangelion is the culmination of Adam and Lilith that causes all of humanity to disappear almost instantaneously…Shinji (the protagonist of the show), a mere student manages to wipe out the individuality of humanity while retaining his own, the chorus just seems to ring more and more true when I watch this video.

“Fuck it all, fuck this world, fuck everything that you stand for, dont belong, don’t exist, don’t give a shit, don’t ever judge me.” Indeed.

After an extended hiatus due to me being way too busy with way too much stuff (then again, who isn’t these days?), Weeaboo Wednesday returns with force!

That’s right kids, we just had our first weekend in April, and you know what that means… new spring anime season! At first glance, there were not very many shows I was interested in this year, but in the spirit of being MWN’s Anime Samurai I’ve bit the bullet and watched as many shows as I could, in order to give you fellow weeaboos my first impressions. Remember to take these with a grain of salt, as the first episode of a show is not always indicative of the rest of the series (Lucky Star, I’m looking at you). I didn’t have a chance to watch everything on my list, so be on the lookout for round 2 next week.

I love metal, so when I heard that there was a series called Detroit Metal City (an obvious play on KISS’s Detroit Rock City) that was about a crazy metal band, I had to see it. I’ve always been a fan of Japanese metal, and a comedy OVA series about the subject sounded right up my alley. Let me tell you, Detroit Metal City does not disappoint.

Better than this.

I’m no Weeaboo, but back in the day I loved me some Dragonball Z. I’m sure there are better anime out there but all it needed to keep me hooked as a kid was likeable characters, huge explosions and crazy fights (which the preparation for would often take an episode alone). While the most likely god awful film adaptation comes out this year, it seems that karma has struck for the Dragonball Z fans who are willing to tolerate this mess in the form of a redone Dragonball Z, now in HD and in proper widescreen. I’m 10 days late with this story but my UK Editor Gandysampras insisted I post a story about it. From what the translation on the site source says, these are the facts:

• The DBZ TV series is receiving an extensive “refresh” for Japanese television airing
• This is a celebration of the 20th anniversary of DBZ
• While based on the original animation production, it is being updated with new technology
• This includes extending the frames for formatting on an HD 16:9 display (note: not cropping the image)
• The original Japanese cast is re-grouping to re-voice the show (where available, and unfortunately not including those that have passed on, such as Hirotaka Suzuoki [Tenshinhan])
• Sound effects are being updated
• Unlike the general show, the OPs and EDs are being completely redone
• While not in the above announcement, other reports are noting that the number of episodes is being reduced from 291 to approximately 100
• This begins 05 April 2009 @ 9 am

It all sounds good and I’m looking forward to NOT torrenting this from Japan.  A reduced number of episodes may seem bad but you have to remember that there was a lot of filler and AHHHHHHHHHHH epsiodes in DBZ. As for Gandy, well he’s wanking off  already. The only negative? You can guarantee there will be a new youtube meme by the end of the first episode.

Via