There's been plenty of animated scifi before this summer, of course — Fox and Blue Sky put out the bog-awful Robots a few years ago, and Disney/Pixar did The Incredibles. There's been underground-y weird animated scifi like Heavy Metal since the 70s, and plenty of animated science fiction/comics stuff on TV. And while we've been dragging our feet in the U.S., the Japanese have been putting science fiction anime on the big screen for decades.

But this will be remembered as the summer science fiction animation broke out, mostly thanks to Wall-E and Clone Wars. It's not just that both films will probably end up having been box-office successes. They're also so different from each other, in style and storylines, that you won't be able to think of science fiction animation as being restricted to a kind of space-operatic goofiness or superhero pastiche ever again. Whether you love either of those films, they're both a proof of concept for two different ways of approaching big-screen CG-animated science fiction.

(Despite having the cartoony chubby humans, Wall-E is actually more photorealistic than Clone Wars, thanks to the awesome pseudo-cinematography of Roger Deakins, complete with lens flare and textures. Clone Wars, meanwhile, deliberately sets out to avoid being photorealistic and winds up with a weird puppet style of animation that may grow on me. Or not. )

At first, I thought the science fiction animated boom would be self-limiting, because of a string of wretched films in the pipeline, like Space Chimps, Fly, and (I have a feeling) the forthcoming Planet 51. These films sport a cheesy not-quite-Pixar style and paper-thin plots. Unlike Pixar films, which are aimed at kids but speak to adults on a whole different level, the Chimps/Fly movies are barely cogent enough for a really slow child.

But Pixar comes to the rescue once again, with the animated Newt, about the last two blue-footed newts in the world, who hate each other but must interbreed in order to save their species. I'm also quite optimistic about Monsters Vs. Aliens, which is based on a great comic book and has put out some really cool images and a great trailer so far. It has a 50-foot woman and a mad scientist with the head of a cockroach, plus a sort of Mars Attacks sensibility.

I'm sort of intrigued by Igor, mostly thanks to the incredible cast listing, including Eddie Izzard, John Cleese and John Cusack. It also has a cute premise: the hunch-back who wants to a mad scientist instead of an "Igor." The latest poster looks sort of clunky and awful, but the trailer is cute and funny. A brain in a jar tries to hypnotize Igor, and when that doesn't work, it just hits him with a spatula. Pure win!

We're also in for a big-screen anime explosion, with American studios involved. Studio Imagi is working on animated Astro Boy and Gatchaman movies, among others. There's also a Heavy Metal remake/homage in the pipeline.

I feel as though these sorts of kid-friendly animated movies have been dominated by fantasy and funny animals for as long as the CG variety has been around. (There's no science behind talking toys in Toy Story or talking cars in Cars.) But now the pendulum is swinging toward scifi premises, maybe as more creators who grew up on scifi in the 1950s and 1960s take charge.

I have two happy observations about the rise of CG animated scifi kiddie movies:

1) Science fiction is the new fairy tale, and that's an awesomely good thing. Who could watch Wall-E without starting to think of him as a young commoner who gets swept up into a castle by a princess, only to discover his own nobility? Etc. etc. The Igor trailer even includes the "Once upon a time" caption. I could totally see Clone Wars' Ahsoka turning into a fairy tale heroine (although she's probably destined for a bad end.) It would be great if generations of kids grew up thinking of robots and scientists the way earlier Disney watchers thought about princesses and flying elephants.

2) On the flipside, even as these animated scifi movies become fairy-tale-ish, they're also more serious and thoughtful than most "grown-up" science fiction movies. Of the summer's big blockbuster films, how many were as smart and debate-provoking as Wall-E? Off the top of my head, I'd say Iron Man and Dark Knight, and that's it. Okay, so Clone Wars is not going to be smart or thought-provoking, I'm pretty sure. But movies like Newt, Igor and Monsters Vs. Aliens at least have the potential to throw in some clever concepts and make you think about issues like extinction, the class system, and the rights of monsters. So I'm cautiously excited about the new scifi animated boom — and I think it's going to be around for a while.

Just leave a comment on this post, and we'll be using a random number generator to pick out two winners. We'll cover the shipping, and you do the watching. Please limit yourself to just one entry, otherwise you'll be unfairly stacking the pack. If we find out you've been leaving more than one comment, we'll pull your plug faster than you can say "Neo." We'll select two different winners on this Wednesday, April 9th, so comment away, cross your fingers, and good luck!

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We'll be providing a list of the winners to the organizers of the event, and they'll have your name on a list and you'll be good to go. Please note that we'll select the first five comments from folks in the NYC area who want to see the movie. For the rest of you, set your Netflix for Tuesday, March 11th, and enjoy.

The film is a Matrix-meets-cyborgs story featuring incredible animation, tons of bullets, lots of John Woo signature slow-motion, and even some cyborg doves. It's arguably, in this blogger's opinion, superior to the original Appleseed, and is at its best when things devolve into pure bullets and octane action. Thankfully, the multi-layered story is cerebral fodder as well as eye candy, so you won't get bored while you watch another clip of armor-piercing bullets get emptied into mindless robo-slaves.

It's best to think of post-apocalyptic movies as "survival movies." There's never been a post-apocalyptic film where the global nightmare killed every single human — unless it was some 1960s avant-garde experiment showing an empty wasteland for two hours. The point of post-apocalyptic movies is that people do survive, even if they have to endure horrible things in the process.

In I Am Legend, we spend a lot of time admiring how well Will Smith has preserved normal life, including stir fried veggies and DVDs. Just like Heston's swinging pad in Omega Man, Smith's living space looks comfy, even luxurious. When I talked to I Am Legend production designer David Lazan, he mentioned that his goal with Will Smith's house was to make it look as much like a normal Washington Square townhouse as possible — until the shutters come down at night.

And the TV show Jericho is all about how the lucky Kansas town clings to domesticity in the face of the mass slaughter of half the United States. The show lingers lovingly over its characters' pristine kitchens and nice clothes, even as they indulge in the greatest luxury of all — petty soap-opera drama.

Part of the thrill of survival movies is witnessing the extreme stuff people have to do to remain alive. It's the same reason we love watching people eat bugs on Survivor, or kids terrorizing each other in the short-lived Kid Nation. When it's not being cozy, Jericho spends a lot of time lingering over the near-starvation of the townspeople and the frozen corpses they have to step over just outside of town.

A few things have changed since 2000, when the nastiest catastrophe to hit the world was John Travolta in a crappy headpiece. These days, the hardest thing is guessing which decaying-orbit bomb will hit us first. Climate crash, Krugmaniac economic collapse, terrorism, peak oil, wars, a nuclear North Korea, avian flu, etc. But more than that, it's increasingly clear that the early 21st. century way of life in America is unsustainable. We can't keep up our current level of energy use or foreign debt forever. It feels a lot like the 1970s, the last time huge disaster movies were this popular.

So we try to imagine what it could be like when the American empire falls and/or the globalized post-industrial economy collapses. And we look for stories that show how we might possibly salvage our asses in that situation.

But maybe there's another explanation: we actually want to tear down our world of maxi-corps, sprawl and environmental destruction. And we can't imagine any way that could happen other than through some kind of omni-fucking calamity.

(Note: Children of Men came out in the U.S. on Dec. 25, 2006, which means almost everybody here saw it in 2007.)

This sequel is much darker than the original Appleseed movie, and has borrowed plot elements from The Matrix, Ghost in the Shell (another property from cyberpunk manga artist Masamune Shirow) and the Terminator series. Where the original film dealt with the unrest between humans and genetically engineered bioroids, this film expands that idea with a techno-organic virus that has the ability to infect human bodies and wants to destroy all mankind. A subplot deals with the main heroine Deunan taking on a new partner, a bioroid clone of her android colleague and lover, Briareos.

There's a lot of slow-motion in this film, and the robotic doves play an interesting part in the film. Since those are John Woo's signature tools, was that his idea, or something you came up with?

In the beginning we shot a 40 second "test" video, and we included some of those action sequences with the doves flying in it. I obviously respect John and see him as an inspiration, and in the beginning I was nervous about how he would react to those scenes, especially the ones with all the bullet casings hitting the ground.

He was a very good sport about it. And the doves, we decided to make those robots because we wanted them to figure into the plot and not just be a prop or simply something onscreen. So we made that adjustment and it fit in perfectly.

How did this story develop?

The story is actually much closer to the original manga than the first film. The world that it takes place in is closer to the world in the first film, but our story in this one is much closer to the original comics.

Our budget on this film was triple the original, and that was because we wanted to explore emotions in CGI characters a lot more, to see how an animated character could express emotion. We also spent three times the amount of time working on this in order to do that.

We really wanted to improve as an anime and move things to the next level, not just make something look "cool." We shot real actors throughout the script and used them as a model for our CGI characters.

Did you take the actors out to locations?

No, that was all done on a studio stage using traditional motion capture techniques. That process took about a month, and we would film the actors with props and weapons that are used in the film, but it was all on a stage.

Is it true that some of the costumes worn by the characters were designed by Prada? How did that come about?

Yes, the owner and designer Miuccia Prada saw the original film and she really loved it, but she said the costumes in it looked terrible. When she found out we were doing a sequel she offered to design the clothes for it, and in some of the scenes you can even see the textures in the materials and it looks amazing.

Are there plans to continue this series using the same team?

Yes, we are starting work on the next film, and we have a plan to make a live-action version of Appleseed as well. That's just in the planning stages, but that's our next step.

Was the original artist, Shirow Masamune, involved in the production at all?

He got involved in terms of the script, and he gave us some notes. He was also involved in the designs of the mecha and the world in the movie. It's been one of the rare times that he's been involved in the production of the movies made from his properties.

What should we take away from this production as a sequel?

We really concentrated on the characters in the movie and making them as realistic as we could in terms of expressions and emotions. We were able to improve the acting in all areas, and we really wanted to focus on how they act throughout the story.