anime

Looking for something good and geeky to watch? Check out this week's new sci-fi home video releases:

Halo Legends (DVD and Blu-ray)
Fans of the popular game franchise won't want to miss this set of anime shorts set in the world of Halo and produced by Japanese animation studios. The rest of us? I think its OK to skip it (and maybe pop in that copy of Batman: Gotham Knight for old times sake). There's a ton of new anime hitting stores today, including Claymore: The Complete Series on Blu-ray, the second half of Bleach Uncut: Season 4, and the Heroic Age complete series set, also on Blu-ray.

Small Wonder: The Complete First Season (DVD)
A scientist creates a creepy little Cylon girl and brings it home to live with his family. Instead of killing it with fire, they're charmed by her monotone computer voice and her ability to shoot sparks out of her ears. Hey, it was the '80s. How were they supposed to know that she'd grow up to start a war and wipe out humanity in the name of the one true god?

If you've been eagerly awaiting the live-action adaptation of the always popular anime Cowboy Bebop, you're going to have to wait just a little bit longer. Keanu Reeves, the film's main acting anchor, recently told MTV that the adaptation does have a finished script, it just so happens to be one that would require a Scrooge McDuck-esque silo full of gold coins to actually bring it to life. In Reeves' own words, "There's a draft of the script, but the writer did such a great job [that] in order to make the movie, you would need half a billion dollars."

Now one may wonder whether or not a writer has indeed done a good job if his script is so extremely cost-prohibitive that it cannot feasibly get made, but it seems the problem lays in just how meticulous writer Peter Craig has been in bringing the story of intergalactic bounty hunters to the big screen. According to a second MTV report, Craig described his script as "extremely true to the show", a statement that was made before Fox had actually read his adaptation.

Now this isn't to say that Cowboy Bebop is dead-in-the-water, it's just a pre-production roadblock. It'll now be up to Craig, and whoever else Fox decides to bring in (and they will almost certainly be bringing in more writers to trim the fat), to scale things down to a reasonable level. To their credit, it seems that Fox understands a film involving spaceships, bounty hunters, mutants, and all manner of star-bound gangsters and creatures all under the umbrella of a very noir visual umbrellas is not going to be done on a tiny budget, but $500,000,000 is not something that gets handed out to, well, anyone but James Cameron.

By: Jessica Barnes

It was just last week that anime fans the world over breathed a sigh of relief that Leonardo DiCaprio's live-action Akira was no more. But, that doesn't mean Hollywood has lost its taste for anime, and there are still plenty of other reboots headed our way. So while most of them have stayed in development limbo, two of the more popular titles: Cowboy Bebop and Robotech have started to make new ground, and some of the people involved are starting to talk.

Cowboy Bebop:
When the live action film of the beloved anime was first announced, fans were not thrilled with the idea. Plus, it probably didn't help that Keanu Reeves was taking the role of Spike. But, maybe we shouldn't count out the film yet, because when it comes to the film's screenwriter, there is good news and some bad news. But, let's start with the good news. In an interview with Anime Vice, Craig was asked about whether or not he was familiar with the series, and to his credit, Craig went into full fan-boy mode, telling them about some of his favorite episodes and that both he and Reeves have been meeting with Sunrise studio (the creator of the anime) to make sure that the original 'feel' of the show remains intact. According to Craig, "they [Sunrise] were very specific about their vision for the series, and how it might convert to a live-action film." -- sounds promising, right? Well, the bad news is that Craig has zero experience with sci-fi, and made his name writing about con-men and dysfunctional families. But, I'm going to remain hopeful that with Sunrise watching over the flick, there might be a chance we get something a little better than expected.

After the jump: a new writer for Robotech...