- The live-action movie remake "Oldboy" we mentioned earlier this month, as a collaboration between Steven Spielberg and Will Smith, might have found itself a screenwriter: Mark Protosevich, who co-wrote I Am Legend (not incidentally starring Will Smith), among others. And it turns out the movie is not a remake of the 2003 Korean film, but will be based on the original, decade-old Japanese manga "Old Boy".

- A new Doraemon anime will be discussed by - you'll never guess who (or where)... Japan's prime-minister Taro Aso, and Russia's puppet-president Dmitry Medvedev. In Peru, go figure! The joint anime project will reportedly star the Japanese manga character Doraemon and the Russian folklore creature Dorafei.

- By the way, Ghibli's Hayao Miyazaki has issues with Taro Aso. Go retire, already!

- Precure All Stars, the upcoming anime film based on the way-too-colorful Precure series, now has a website. It will premiere in spring 2009, and will feature all 3 sets of Pretty Cure heroines.

 (...)

 Continue reading 'Checkpoint: Oldboy, Doraemon, Miyazaki'...

Breaking out of her lucrative silence for a brief update, Gia relayed her finding of a press release issued by the Japanese parent company Broccoli, bringing some sad news for the few customers they still had over in North America. By the end of this year, Broccoli International USA will be shutting down, and by February 2009 no trace is expected to be left of them stateside, as their liquidation completes.


Broccoli International USA was established back in March 2002 as a subsidiary focused on publishing manga and artbooks (as Broccoli Books), and it's always been a pretty tiny operation - leaving it with little chance to survive the mounting competition from recent years. They also managed manga, anime and game properties locally for their parent company, including Di Gi Charat, Galaxy Angel, Aquarian Age, Bushilord, Disgaea, Murder Princess and sola - whose ageless loli-in-a-box Mayuko is sadly pictured above.

Buh-bye, cauliflower-kun!

A tiny update for the upcoming Slayers Evolution-R series is in order, now that the "revolutionized" anime's second season received a firm TV debut date: January 21, 2009 from 9 PM on Japan's AT-X network, according to a report picked up by San'plex. It seems everyone is perplexed as to how on Earth they're pushing on with the series, despite the demoralizingly-low DVD sales registered by the first season, Slayers Revolution. So fans of the franchise might want to thoroughly enjoy it, while it still lasts.

After that potential chibi-Toradora! story the other day, it came to me we didn't even have a gallery for this season's prime tsundere anime. But that is all fixed now, thanks to a long night of 2D pr0n browsing on our source of choice (and a couple of softies of choice used up in the process). What you'll find inside is a fine selection of fanarts mostly featuring Taiga Aisaka, along with a few showing Minori Kushieda, and even fewer - albeit unavoidable - combos with Shana, the ultimate loli tsundere. Enjoy!


In other random Toradora! news, how about the Toradora! OP recreated in Excel. Making that looks almost as hard as using Excel with Romanian language menus. Almost...

Except for that one time after it was announced during the summer, we had no other opportunity to write about the second Ichigo Mashimaro OVA. And loli-Jesus knows just how much we longed for a chance! Tonight, at last, we caught word that Ichigo Mashimaro encore - as it's called - will have its first OVA volume released in Japan on January 23, 2009. Fungaah!


Although San'plex isn't sure yet just how many episodes the OVA will be squeezed in, a bit of digging on AniDB shows no more than 2 episodes - with the second one scheduled for release on March 25, 2009. And the same thing is announced on Geneon's website for the OVA. Oh and, by the way, this November 21 will mark the release of a DVD box set edition of the original TV series, packed full of unspecified - though no doubt highly lolicious - extras.

Another new anime announcement today emerged from the pages of Shueisha's Ultra Jump magazine, once again via ANN. The magazine's freshly released December issue heralds an upcoming Dogs anime based on Shirow Miwa's action manga, which first ran from 2000 to 2001, and was restarted in 2005 under the title Dogs: Bullets & Carnage. An English version of the manga will start being released by Viz from April 2009.


The manga is set in a future city from Europe which extends far underground. There, "a genetically altered albino gunman, a chain-smoking mercenary, a former assassin, and a katana-wielding orphan ply their deadly trades on the streets and below the surface". Sounds interesting enough, and stylistically it's even more intriguing. The anime, currently in the works at studio David Production, has yet to receive a release date.

Despite narrow-minded individuals (not unlike myself) who fail to see anything interesting in an anime about a restaurant / bakery / ramen shop / gay bartender, another such project was announced today. This time we'll be dealing with an anime adaptation based on Natsume Ono's manga, Ristorante Paradiso, originally published from 2005 to 2006, and followed by a side-story called Gente: Ristorante no Hitobito (Gente: The People of the Restaurant).


A teaser website for next year's RisPara anime is up and running, and below you'll find the original manga's story, as recounted by ANN.

"The manga's story is set in a restaurant in Rome that the heroine Nicoletta visits from the countryside. Her parents divorced when she was young, so her grandparents raised her while her mother tried to remarry. Unfortunately for Nicoletta, her mother abandons her even after remarrying. Nicoletta goes to the restaurant that is now owned by the new husband of Nicoletta's mother, and ends up apprenticing there among a kitchen staff of colorful characters."

A short chibi anime version for the ongoing Toradora! series may be nothing more than wishful thinking on San'plex's part, for the time being. But we won't deny the favorable odds for such a project to be made, one day. Especially not after finding out that the DVD release of Toradora! (set for January 2009 afaik) will include special images with chibi renditions of the anime's characters - Taiga, Minori & co.


If we're to recall the hysterious Shana-tan specials that followed the first Shakugan no Shana anime, it's plain to see how such a chibi mini-series would be a perfect fit for Toradora's tsundere, not to mention it would be a great distraction until the series' presumed second season. The lulz must flow!

How could anyone have ever imagined that those enchanting Japanese idols, whose sole purpose of meaning is to become our short-lived wanking material, would go even lower and engage in prostitution? Right, irony aside, the latest confirmation of this "trend" - if one was ever needed - comes from former gravure idol Minako Komukai, who started making some hawt revelations after she got fired on account of her "various health problems".


While she herself "swears to God" to have never done anything like that (funny she should bring God into discussion), she says: “I saw so many gravure idols doing that, it was like a second job to them; like it was expected of us”... O RLY?

More pictures of Minako's uncompromising chubbyness right after this piece of insight into the idols' shady dealings, raeped reaped from San'plex: (...)

 Continue reading 'Japanese Idols' Second Job: Prostitution'...

Take this with a grain of ichigo pudding powder, but it seems that we can add another anime to the 2009 line-up. A fresh ANN story tonight points at the Letter Bee (Tegami Bachi) manga as a likely candidate for an anime adaptation. This is based on comments made by Shueisha's Jump Square magazine editor-in-chief Masahiko Ibaragi, during a chat on some random Japanese TV show.

The way he put it was that he "thinks" that there will be a Tegami Bachi anime on television in 2009. But whatever he based his belief on, his editorial position lends him a fair bit of credibility. He also noted that the recent Tegami Bachi anime special, which ran for about 30 minutes during the Jump Super Anime Tour events in Japan, will be streamed on the Jumpland website from November 24.


The original Letter Bee manga is about a boy who runs deliveries as a "Letter Bee" messenger throughout a strange fantasy land. So far it was compiled into 5 volumes, and was licensed for North American distribution by Viz Media earlier this year.