The plot of The Dream Machine has yet to be revealed (at least in English), but Kon gave his overview on the film last year in an interview with Anime News Network:

The title will be Yume Miru Kikai. In English, it will be The Dream Machine. On the surface, it's going to be a fantasy-adventure targeted at younger audiences. However, it will also be a film that people who have seen our films up to this point will be able to enjoy. So it will be an adventure that even older audiences can appreciate. There will be no human characters in the film; only robots. It'll be like a "road movie" for robots.

The official site for the movie has launched, bringing with it the first images of Kon's enigmatic robots, Robin and Rurico.

[via Twitch]

Paul Johnson, who calls himself "Otaking," is working on his own Doctor Who anime, a video in which the Third Doctor encounters thugs, the military, and a stereotypical anime babe, and gets caught in a war between the Daleks and the Cybermen.

He's released a couple of brief clips, including this one starring the Daleks:

Here's the most recent segment, which features the Cybermen and shows us a glimpse of the Doctor himself:

He's also posted a video that shows his process from penciling to final product for a scene where the Doctor takes down a few street thugs:

[via Japanator via Topless Robot]

This review definitely contains spoilers, although it won't give away anything major, that you couldn't figure out from watching the trailers and looking at stills.

So you probably already know what Astro Boy is about: there's a scientist, Dr. Tenma, and his brilliant little boy, Toby, gets killed. So Dr. Tenma makes a robot replica of Toby, complete with Toby's memories, and gives him the most cutting-edge armaments and power source, so he can never be hurt again. But the robot version can't replace Toby, so Dr. Tenma ultimately rejects him — and he goes off to become Astro Boy.

I've grown to have a healthy appreciation for the manga of Osamu Tezuka — his medical thriller Ode To Kirihito is riveting and totally not what I expected — but writer/director David Bowers added to Tezuka's world-building in ways that totally enhanced the story for me. And a huge part of that was Bowers' vision of a world of enslaved robots, which is both funny and occasionally disturbing.

Bowers, an Aardman Animation veteran who worked on Chicken Run and Wallace And Gromit, lets his Aardman roots show most of all when he's dealing with some of the robots in the movie. From Dr. Tenma's robot servant to a flying a window-cleaning squirt bottle and squeegee, to a robot trash-can dog, the robots are always cute and silly, yet also can't help reminding you of their non-person status in the gleaming futuristic Metro City. A clever, retro-looking instructional film at the start of the movie serves to underscore this point, showing robots being used and then tossed aside, onto the giant scrap heap that Metro City floats over.

But don't worry — at no point does Astro Boy give you a dry lecture about robot rights, or the unfairness of enslaving other sentient beings. Instead, it contains tons of sly jokes and clever moments that make you sympathize and identify with the robots — even as we're rooting for Astro Boy's quest to be recognized as a human.

And that's where Astro Boy gets really interesting. Because, of course, the original story is all about Astro wanting to be a "real boy," like Pinocchio. By juxtaposing that quest with the constant reminders that all the other robots are just as aware as Astro Boy himself, the movie makes the standard "quest for humanity" a lot more complex.

Because Astro Boy is the only robot who actually appears human and is programmed with a real human's memories, he's the only bot with the option of blending in with human society. He's also almost the only bot who's not programmed with Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, which force the other robots to be servile even when they don't want to be. The more we sympathize with the other robots, who don't have the same options Astro has, the less clear-cut Astro's quest for humanity begins to appear.

Some of the most fascinating scenes in Astro Boy deal with this question of "passing" as human — early on, after Astro Boy is created, he thinks he's a "real" boy — but the other robots can see the truth at a glance. Dr. Tenma's servant bot is instructed to treat the robot boy as if he were human, and this nearly causes a robo-conniption fit. "I'm so freaking out right now!" the robot says a few times. And then later, Astro Boy knows he's a robot, but he's trying to live among humans as one of them — except that he keeps having to worry that the other robots will "out" him.

It's not much of a spoiler to say that Astro Boy gets to be accepted as a real boy by the end of the movie — but that only leaves you with more questions, particularly about how this will affect all the other robots. The movie only offers the barest hints that Astro Boy's special status could end up benefiting all his robot brothers and sisters.

There are two things I love in children's movies: world-building and subversiveness. And Astro Boy has enough of both of them to build a thousand giant robots out of.

We already talked a lot about the movie's world-building in this exclusive interview with Bowers and designers Jake Rowell and Luis Grane: the movie takes place in a floating city, which includes an entire mountain levitated above the ground. And we get little glimpses of the history of the development of the robots in this society, especially when we meet a 100-year-old robot named Zog (voiced, rather laconically, by Samuel L. Jackson.)

As for the subversiveness — well, I already talked about the fact that the movie paints Astro Boy as a bit of a race traitor (in a gentle, sly way that will not make your kids bawl, I promise.) But then the film turns around and gives us a hilariously inept trio of robot liberationists — the Robot Revolution Front, three former appliances (including a refrigerator) who make grandiose speeches that remind me of the People's Front Of Judea in Monty Python's Life Of Brian.

Unfortunately, because the members of the Robot Revolution Front are still bound by the Three Laws of Robotics, their biggest plan for defeating the human hegemony is to attack one of the humans with a particularly large feather — and tickle him. A lot.

One of the biggest cheer-worthy moments in the movie is when we meet a second robot who isn't subject to the Three Laws, and who is willing to kick some ass.

Because we don't really want to see Astro Boy struggling against vague, nebulous anti-robot prejudice, the movie gives us two clear-cut villains: the President of Metro City, who wants Astro Boy's super-advanced power source to power a new war machine, and HamEgg, a roboticist who's fallen from grace and now organizes nasty robot gladitorial matches on the surface.

And it's the former villain, the President, who provides one of Astro Boy's few weak spots. He's so transparently a satire on George Bush and other leaders who want to start bogus wars to boost their approval ratings, that he becomes a bit painful to watch. The movie is fairly subtle about its other messages, but whenever the President comes on screen, we're suddenly assaulted by neon signs blaring "POLITICAL MESSAGE." Also, you'll cringe a bit when a scientist explains the difference between Astro Boy's power source (which is intrinsically good and morally pure) and a separate, evil power source, which creates negative vibes and aggression.

But those are minor quibbles, really — the spoon-feeding around the President only stands out because the rest of the movie is so determined to let you draw your own conclusions. There are no easy answers to Astro Boy's dilemma — he feels like a human boy, but he knows he really belongs to the subjugated robot class — and the movie doesn't really attempt to offer us any.

And that's what makes this such a great kids' movie. It's pure, engaging fun pretty much the whole way through, with a few bits of sadness, like when Astro Boy's flesh-and-blood model dies (there's no blood; he just vanishes.) But the movie takes the "kid caught between two worlds" plot you've seen a million times before and adds an extra layer of weirdness. Both you and your kid will be thrilled by all the zoomy flying-robot action, but you'll both be left debating exactly where Astro Boy should want to belong anyway. And that's definitely one of the hallmarks of a good movie.

So let's get this straight... according to Caprica, the human brain only occupies 300 megabytes of hard drive space. But according to this anime, a man's sperm contains a whopping 1600 gigabytes of memory upgrade. That seems a tad skewed, but then again, you never know.

I love the part where the guy's sperm has so much memory in it, that she has to write a whole new directory with her new name attached. He actually names her by fucking her. It's sort of romantic, I guess. And then it works — so go, beam attack! Also, right after this bit, we discover that the other sexbot went crazy because her write-protection was removed, and too many other men were able to write to her directory. In other words, she was a crazy slut bot.

We already featured a different scene from Buttobi CPU in our round-up of sex mechas and space pirates in anime porn, but this sequence is so fantastic, it needed its own post.

We weren't too impressed with the longer, somewhat stately trailer for the new Yamato movie back in June. But this new trailer, (which seems to be two trailers stuck together) hits all the right notes — there's some of the same footage of Yamato bursting out of the ice, plus deadly comets and evil snarling people. Derek Wildstar looks at a picture of his fallen captain. And then — space battles! Explosions! Lasers and missiles flying in the void! And finally... yes! The wave motion gun!

It really doesn't take much to make us happy. [Fanboy.com]

The CG film comes out in October 23d.

[via Superpunch]

Astro Boy the movie about a robot boy who's rejected by his maker (Nic Cage) then turns tiny superhero, will open in theaters on October 23rd.

[via MSN]

You know, when android-killing robots break down, this isn't exactly what I imagined would happen.

Mahoromantic via Anime News Network

You may not have realized this but one of the best ways to gain power from an elf is to strip her. Beneath her clothes are runes and magical spells and things that are of interest to those who deal in the supernatural. That's why our band of heroes, in their efforts to stop dark magic, have to do a lot of stripping. As you can see in these clips from several episodes, all put together like a little box of elf naughtiness just for you.

Those Who Hunt Elves via Anime News Network

Firs off, go ahead and breathe a sigh of relief — the modern day Imagi recreation is very close to the Tezuka Astro Boy we know and love. The feel, look, attitude and even his robot smile all remain in the Tezuka wheelhouse. Imagi Studios went to great lengths to make sure that it stayed that way throughout the film, they even brought in Tezuka's son to keep them all in line.

Their efforts weren't in vain: the shiny, robot-heavy futuristic floating city of Metro City (Earth itself being too dirty for any civilized folk to inhabit) is full of charm and style. The whole place practically glitters, it looks so clean and new, but the warmth that is little Astro Boy is still there. He still struggles with acceptance in this world, his loveless relationship with his maker and father Dr. Tenma (voiced by Nic Cage) and finding a place where he belongs.

At the special preview show for Astro Boy, director David Bowers took us through a host of clips detailing decisions made by the international production, which had studios both in America and in Japan.

The first clip showed the "birth" of Astro Boy. A somber Dr. Tenma, channeling his inner mad scientist, is hell bent on bringing his recently deceased son back to life. All that remains of his little boy is a red baseball cap. But that's okay, because the Ministry of Science has the know-how on how to extract human memories from one strand of hair. He scrolls through blueprints and crafts together a body. The round Dr. Elefun appears (voiced by Bill Nighy) with the all important blue-core energy. The glowing matter is what brings the little robot to life, but as with all things that contain such great power there's a down side — but more on that later. Lights flash electricity is shot out in a Dr. Frankenstein-esque manner and the little boy comes to life, to the mesmerized delight of Dr. Tenma.

The entire creation moment was fantastic, but it raised the only concern I have for this picture. Is Nic Cage too familiar? Granted, Cage is a huge fan of Astro Boy, and at the meeting Bowers explained how Cage had tried to bring a live-action Astro to life, once upon a time, but still something about his voice removed me from Tenma. Ah well, it's a small complaint, that I'm sure will be cast aside after you view the movie longer than a few short minutes — here's hoping, at least.

The next clip showed the problem with robot and human assimilation. Sadly once Tenma brings the little Astro home he doesn't act exactly like his dead son. This makes Tenma angry, and he sends him to his room debating on whether or not to throw him out forever, since he's just a constant reminder of his former kid. Little Astro sits on his bed, totally unaware that he's a robot and wonders why his father no longer loves him. But while he's moping a little pair of worker bots come to his window, Mr. Squirt and SQUEEGEE, and guess what they do? The two little bots talk amongst themselves in their secret robot language, and all of a sudden little Astro realizes he too can speak the robot lingo. And soon takes off on a rocket boot self discovery flight pattern, where he punches right through a mountain.

The robots in this picture are brilliant, especially the hap-hazard creations from Ham Egg (Nathan Lane's Oliver Twist Fagin like character). They allow for a lot of creativity and exploration as to how far the science has grown, plus I love robots that have one particular job, like Mr. Squirt.

As we mentioned before, the blue core power source presents a problem for the wee robotic wonder. The government, represented by the evil tongued Donald Sutherland's President Stone, craves the blue bit of energy and will stop at nothing to get it. Even if that means deploying a whole fleet of flying soldiers, in futuristic flying machines. The army blasts Astro with their ammo trying to get his gears to go kaput, so they can deliver the goods to their leader. Who, in turn, builds an even bigger Peace Keeper Robot (first picture) who does anything but keep the peace. Instead the giant beast absorbs power, growing stronger and stronger and in turn, wrecks havoc on the floating city.

In the end it looks like it's up to Astro and his band of dirty Earth-bound misfit friends and their trash-can dog to save the day from the giant robot.

Bottom line: the movie is about more than just cute robots and funny characters. The few clips we viewed were polished to perfection, and the original feel of Tezuka's series is intact. I really hope American kids learn to embrace this character because he's got the rocket boot-strappy know-how of a great hero. Plus who doesn't love that hair? So far so good, we can't wait to see more.

The full trailer will be released in September but you can see more clips next week if you'll be at San Diego Comic Con on Thursday in room 6BCF.

Ponyo is a little baby goldfish who wants to be human. Soon she gets her wish and heads to the surface to befriend a human boy, but the balance in nature isn't steady. Disney is putting it out in the States, and it'll hit theaters on August 14th 2009. If you liked Miyazaki's Spirited Away, check out Ponyo.

Here's hoping that Astro Boy's Pinnochio-bot odyssey lives up to the stills we've seen so far, and the finished product has a sense of motion and excitement to go with these painterly images. The zooming footage we've seen in the trailers has looked promising, but the human interactions, I'm still not so sure about. Here's the above image in a larger format, plus a second image.

And a very special movie it is. It will take the cult series from animation to live action, Japanese to English, and combine the financial resources of six nations: Japan, the UK, Australia, Singapore, Canada and China. The $30 million adventure will be shot in Australia, with a release date in 2012.

According to Hollywood Reporter:

The contract will make use of the Singapore-Australia, Australia-Canada, Canada-Singapore, China-Australia and China-Canada co-production treaties, potentially enabling the film to tap into soft money from the national governments and also qualify for mainland China release . . . Director and cast have yet to be decided. The spokesman said that "Crisis" will feature two male leads and a quartet of female action babes — two Caucasian and two Asian.

OK, fine, I guess I can accept these changes, though I think if they're going to change the ethnic composition of the group they should go all Star Trek and try to have representatives from several different cultures. I just hope that the girls' band is still going to be called Priss and the Replicants. Because that was just too awesome.

For the uninitiated, the original Bubblegum Crisis (not to be confused with prequel AD Police, or the late 1990s reboot of the series) takes place Megatokyo, a future version of Tokyo where a quake has destroyed the city. Synthetic creatures called Boomers, created for slave labor, have taken to breaking free and going rogue. Only the AD Police, including our heroines, can stop them! It's sort of like Charlie's Angels with cyborgs and seriously cool smart armor.

Hollywood Reporter (via Anime News Network)

One of the problems with the TV series was that it had to follow the plot of the manga, which was also being produced at a rate of one chapter a week. However, one 14-page chapter, consisting mostly of fighting, does not easily fill up a 20-minute animated TV show. As a result, the originally brisk and action-packed manga became padded out into a bloated mess of a TV show. To kill time (and save animation costs), characters would just talk endlessly about what was happening, rather than doing anything. Sometimes the animators created their own non-canon storylines, "filler arcs," in which characters wandered off and got into little adventures or fought one another in different combinations. However, these side stories were never allowed to alter the main plot. Countless animated movies and TV specials, which regurgitated concepts from the manga (Hey! Freeza's got a brother, and he's a bad guy too!) usually just exacerbated the problem. The animators also do an inconsistent job of adapting Toriyama's cartoony character designs for the screen.

For those who would prefer a tighter Dragon Ball Z anime, there is hope; on April 5, 2009, Toei Animation released the first episode of Dragon Ball Kai ("Dragon Ball altered/modified") a remastered edition of the original Dragon Ball Z created for the show's 20th anniversary. According to Toei and Fuji TV, in addition to audio and video remastering, Dragon Ball Kai will eliminate the many "filler arcs" and redundant scenes created for the original Dragon Ball Z anime and make the story stick more closely to Akira Toriyama's original manga.

As for the speedlines and crazy hair and the guys shooting energy out of their hands due to their mastery of martial arts, that's all there in the original. (The yellow hair is the outward sign of a power-up, "Super Saiyan," which doesn't show up until the second half of the original manga.) And for those who embrace the absurdity, there are many fan-made live-action Dragon Ball movies.

Eventually, in the manga and anime, we learn a little more about the Dragon Balls: they are artifacts created by Kami-sama (literally "god"), the mysterious supernatural being in charge of protecting Earth. When Goku meets Kami-sama he finds out why the Dragon Balls were made, although the explanation isn't so convincing (basically, Kami-sama made them to give humans something to strive for). Gradually we also find out that there are various rules that apply to the wishes. For instance, you can bring the dead back to life, but you can't bring the same person back twice. Further complicating matters, the second half of the series introduces a second set of Dragon Balls, the Namekian Dragon Balls, which have different rules and summon a different dragon. The anime-only storyline of Dragon Ball GT introduces still more Dragon Ball variants.

Bulma's quest for the Dragon Balls, for which she recruits Goku as her bodyguard, is what sets Dragon Ball in motion. However, the truth is that, in the grand scheme of things over the 42-volume graphic novel series, the Dragon Balls really aren't that important. Bad guys are always trying to get them so they can wish to rule the world or attain ultimate power, and the good guys are always trying to stop them. The only thing the good guys ever use the Dragon Balls for, more or less, is to wish their dead friends back to life. In short, they're a MacGuffin. Dragon Balls are the title of the series, but they're no substitute for good ol' martial arts training.

* In the film, Goku is a semi-normal high school student, rather than a childish monkey-boy with a tail who lives in the woods. However, even in the anime and manga, Goku does eventually grow up from a three-foot-tall Peanuts character into a normal-sized, perhaps Chatwin-sized adult.
* Piccolo's skin isn't a very bright green, and he doesn't seem to have antennae
* Master Roshi, who in the manga is a dirty old man who asks to look at Bulma's panties in return for a Dragon Ball, doesn't commit any acts of sexual harassment
* a bunch of characters have been removed, including Kuririn (Goku's fellow student under Master Roshi), the talking animals Pu'ar and Oolong, and Master Roshi's pet turtle
* plenty of plots and subplots have been removed, leaving the movie as kind of a mixture of Dragon Ball volumes 1-2 (the introduction of Goku and Bulma) and 13-16 (the introduction of Piccolo, and the big fight).

There's plenty more. A more serious complaint, however, is that "the script is an absolute, unmitigated disaster," to quote Zach Berlatsky of anime news network. What does the creator, Akira Toriyama himself, think about the Dragonball adaptation? Here's a translation of his words in a text announcement preceding a February 2009 promotional video:

"As the original creator, I had a feeling of "Huh?" upon seeing the screenplay and the character designs, but the director, all the actors, the staff, and the rest are nothing but "ultra" high-caliber people. Maybe the right way for me and all the fans to appreciate it is as a New Dragonball of a different dimension. Perhaps, this might become a great masterpiece of power! Hey, I look forward to it!!"

Toriyama is more charitable to Hollywood than Alan Moore-but then again, Toriyama, like most manga artists, has always had no illusions about producing mass entertainment. (Incidentally, it's worth mentioning that Dragonball: Evolution is not the first Dragon Ball film; that honor goes to 1989's Dragon Ball: The Magic Begins, an unlicensed Chinese live-action adaptation.)

The best thing going for Dragonball: Evolution is that, beneath all the spiky hair and shouting, Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball is a good story. (Particularly if you're a 14-year-old boy.) The fights and cliffhangers are exciting, the villains are reprehensible and the heroes are noble (and sometimes the villains are noble too, deep down), and the mixture of sci-fi, fantasy and comedy is entertaining and imaginative.

But there are other elements of Dragon Ball which may be difficult to make the transition to live action. One of these is the quirky, simple art style which gives Toriyama's work so much of its appeal. Toriyama's stories may be intense by the standards of American children's animation, but the appeal of his art is the cartooniness, which, when Dragon Ball started in the '80s, stood out among more square-jawed macho manga like City Hunter and Fist of the North Star. (Today, on the other hand, the influence of Dragon Ball has made the big-eyed, spiky-haired angular look the default manga style.) Putting simple, cartoony characters in dramatic situations is one of the trademark elements of manga and anime, and a more interesting way to adapt Dragon Ball might have been with film-quality animation or CGI, like the upcoming Astro Boy live-action movie. Although Keanu Reeves may not look entirely like Spike Spiegel in Cowboy Bebop, no real human being can look quite like a Toriyama character.

To use another example, Akira is set in a recognizably real urban sci-fi environment, but Dragon Ball is set in a primary-colored, fairytale world. The Wachowski Bros.' Speed Racer tried the "live-action cartoon" approach, with mixed success, but will Dragonball: Evolution go the grim-and-gritty route and turn out like the live-action Super Mario Bros.? Manga and anime fans cringe at the word "cartoon," but it's a good word to describe Toriyama's creations: a world which combines aliens and magic dragons, comedy and drama, absurdity and sincerity, a world of sweat and blood and winking unrealism.

Here's the full version of the wallpaper, and you can also download it in a variety of sizes over at the movie's official site.