The Gatchaman teaser trailer showed at the Anime Expo in Los Angeles, and somebody was able to download their visual impressions into a digital storage device. Directed by Kevin Munroe (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) it looks pretty dynamic and exciting, at least as far as we can see from this low-res copy. Here's hoping we get to see more soon! Gatchman, based on the 1970s Japanese series Science Ninja Team Gatchaman, is out fall 2010. [Comic Book Movie]

The feature film focusing on the Science Ninja Team Gatchaman is supposed to come out in 2010. The group is made up of 5 smart characters, with equally stunning bird-like suits and helmets, based on the fantastic 1970s Anime series. We eagerly await the release, because it looks smooth as hell based on the concept art we've already seen.

[via Twitch]

Astro Boy is the story of a scientist who creates a robot kid to replace his dead son. But the robot kid can't fulfill the grieving father's expectations, so he journeys off in search of acceptance, entering a netherworld of betrayal and robot gladiators. Eventually, he returns home to save the father who rejected him. The film stars the vocal talent of Freddie Highmore, Nicholas Cage, Eugene Levy, Bill Nighy, Donald Sutherland and Kristen Bell.

Earlier today, Slashfilm reported that Astro Boy had shut down production. There have been reports for a while that Imagi was having financial difficulties — in December, auditors Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu cast doubt on Imagi's financial resources going forward.

But Corbett says Imagi definitely has the money to finish making Astro Boy, which already has distribution with Summit Entertainment and a release date of Oct. 23, 2009. She says the film remains on course to make that release date.

In a nutshell, here's what happened: Imagi is funded by private equity firms, and the company had received some funding last year. A new round of funding was set to kick in on Feb 3, but in the meantime the company was counting on some "bridge financing" to cover expenses between now and early February.

When that "bridge financing" looked like it might not materialize, the only responsible thing to do was shut down the company's U.S. offices for a week, says Corbett. Everyone, including the animators, was put on "mandatory unpaid leave," until the new round of financing comes in on Feb. 3. (Union rules require the company to let everyone go if they don't have money on hand to pay salaries.)

Says Corbett:

We had this money secured in the late fall. We had bridge money to take us through February, when we knew that bridge money was not going to [materialize]... we could not have people come in and not be sure [we'd be able to pay them.]

This only affects the company's U.S. office — the Hong Kong office is closed down too, but that's for Chinese New Year, when everything in Hong Kong shuts down anyway.

So where does that leave Astro Boy? "Our number one objective is to get back on the rails," says Corbett. "We want to do everything to get Astro Boy out the door." The film is entirely storyboarded and planned out. The animation is about 50 percent rendered and completed at this point, and almost all of the film's vocal talent has already been recorded. Most importantly, the company already has enough money coming in, in February, to finish off work on Astro Boy.

Meanwhile, the company is continuing to raise money for upcoming projects. Corbett wants to put out a CG Gatchaman movie in November 2010. "We're trying to do a film every year to 18 months," Corbett says. Right now, Corbett is in Chicago working on sponsorship opportunities. McDonald's and American Greetings are already involved with Astro Boy, and she's pitching additional partners like Kraft and General Mills for Gatchaman. Astro Boy tie-ins will include everything from action figures to greeting cards.

Meanwhile, what about that trailer we showed you recently for T-28, the movie based on the franchise known in the U.S. as Gigantor? That was a trial balloon, explains Corbett. T-28 is a property that Imagi founder Francis Kao has been interested in working on for several years, and the company decided to release a teaser trailer to see if people would be interested in a full-length film. They were blown away by the interest, but there are no immediate plans to do a T-28/Gigantor movie.

T-28 is presumably short for Tetsujin-28, the original Japanese name for the manga and anime series that became Gigantor in the U.S. It looks pretty close to the original, based on my flawed memories. I love the look of the robots, but the only human face, that of Jimmy Sparks, looks a little weird to me. It looks not quite human, sort of in the same way the faces in Clone Wars do. But I don't think it's as intentional as the puppet-esque faces in Clone Wars are.

In any case, let's hope this movie — and Astro Boy — both manage to get finished. Imagi is also working on a Gatchaman film that's released some amazing-looking art. Unfortunately, auditors Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu cast doubt whether Imagi will have the financial resources to make any of these films happen, in late December. Robot fingers crossed! [Movie Trailers]

For a closer look at additional Gatchaman scenes check out our previous super science team coverage complete with movie stills.

[Imagi]

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.

This image shows the team in the ISO lobby, and Joe being arrested by ISO soldiers.

And you should be able to figure out on your own who this is playing yo-yo. (I'm guessing Jun, who uses an explosive yo-yo as a weapon?) And apparently the cityscape in the background is inspired by Hong Kong. [Felix Ip]

The Gatchaman movie is being done by Imagi, which did a motion-capture Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film and is working on Astro Boy. Original director Kevin Munroe (who worked on Turtles) is off the Gatchaman project, and Ip says in the comments on his blog that the concept drawings Munroe unveiled last year aren't being used any more. Instead, the look of the film is being pushed to be more anime and stylized, and less photorealistic. (Actually, I'm not 100 percent sure if the image above is part of the film's new look, or part of the discarded concept art. It's still on the Imagi website, and it's not one of the batch of images that Ip specifically disavowed. It's just such a cool image that I wanted to show it off. The three newest images, from Ip's blog, are in the gallery.)

The Gatchaman team works for the International Science Organization, preventing Galactor from taking control over the Earth's resources. Because of the plot element of villains wanting to misuse our precious natural elements, the original Gatchaman has a bit of an environmentalist bent to it. So if the remake wants to include a green message, it won't seem as shoehorned as the eco-message in the new Day The Earth Stood Still seems like it'll be.

[Felix Ip and Imagi, via NowShowing]

Imagi is selling shares in the company for an increase in funding that will hopefully increase its " development of four full-length feature computer graphics imagery animation movies, scheduled tentatively to be released from 2009 to 2011." Imagi is already set to release movies of the classics Astro Boy and Gatchaman. It's probably a safe bet that the other two releases designated for those years (they'll put out a movie every 8 months) will most likely be anime as well.

Hollywood is mad for live action anime remakes: Leonardo DiCaprio's production company and Warner Brothers are set to bring Akira to life, and Stephen Spielberg and DreamWorks are recreating the immensely popular Ghost in the Shell, which will also be 3-D. But I'm most excited for the re-creation of Robotech, and the mecha-warriors of the future.

I'm looking forward to a year of introducing the world of anime to the mainstream audience, I especially would like to see what everyone will think of Takashi Murakami Planting the Seeds feature film.

It's a mere matter of months until we start seeing more American live action flicks with school girl's toting around weaponry Mai HiME style, and is it wishful thinking to hope for a epic fantasy remake of InuYasha? I say the more girls in school outfits blowing up the world, the better.

• Christina Ricci's character kung-fu fights and drives fast cars just like the boys in Speed Racer, but her lipstick always matches her car's chrome finish. [Sci Fi Wire]
• When rescuers show up on the island, the residents divide about whether to leave, and Jack's group may make the wrong choice. And Jack and Kate may have a baby. [Watch With Kristin]
• The President of the USA visits a rebuilding Jericho, and Stanley proposes to former cityslicker Mimi in Jericho season two. [SyFyPortal]
• You can quit doing the Vulcan breath-holding ritual for a Shatner cameo in Star Trek XI, but Greg Grunberg (Heroes) may appear. [Moviehole]
• The Gatchaman film will have more realistic faces than other CGI movies, and develop the origins of the spacefaring Ninja team. [IESB]
• Hancock, Will Smith's drunken superhero movie, will be a broad, Wayans-esque comedy, judging from this trailer. [BuzzSugar]
• The Doctor will cop a feel of Kylie Minogue's waitress character Astrid — and Jennifer Saunders (AbFab) may play the Doctor Who lead for one episode. [The Sun]