- The live-action movie adaptation of Honey & Clover has just been released on DVD by Viz Pictures, featuring English subtitles and a price tag of $24.98. "Special bonus features on the disc include cast interviews, and a dedicated website about the film is available at www.honeyandclover.us".

- Mobile Suit Gundam MS IGLOO 2: Juuryoku Sensen (Gravity's Warfront) will be an OVA, with the first episode to be released this October 24. As mentioned one month ago, it's a 3D CG mecha anime, sequel to The Hidden One Year War film series.

- Axe murders are so last year. The latest murderistic trend seems to be placing needles inside food in stores, Rena-style. On the same day, Mainichi reported about a needle found in cabbage (Cryo backup), and a nail found in ham package (Cryo backup). Itadakimasu!

- And for our closing HD linking, Shingo went through the trouble of researching the story behind Himajin's disappearance. It was the ero-anime studio which closed its doors last summer, and the story involves titles like Sora no Iro, Mizu no Iro (episode 2 finally coming this June), and Spice and Wolf... And the story goes on with various offspring studios, including one called Shelf, working on its debut eroge Kagiroi - pictured bellow.

The trailer for the Higurashi movie that we added yesterday already revealed this, but it's well worth saying it again: a second live-action Higurashi movie is already in the making, even as we (or at least the Japanese) wait for the first one's premiere this Saturday, May 10. Judging by this trailer, it doesn't look bad at all. And neither do the would-be lolis. (Update: Just noticed on Canned Dogs that a Japanese movie review site rated the movie 10... out of 100... so much for my enthusiasm)


Other bits and pieces of information surfaced a few days ago from the Megami Magazine (via ANN), teasing us with a few more details about the third Higurashi no Naku Koro ni anime. First of all, it appears that Higurashi 3 will not be a full-length series, but only a short, 3-episode OVA. And secondly, we have a tentative title for it: Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Rei - just like a fan-made software disc from 2006 which added two chapters based on the original Higurashi visual novel.

Sadly, there's still no release date for Higurashi 3, but we should at least see some preview footage this year. Like we said in our "Higurashi vs. Higurashi 2" article, it's gonna be an excruciating wait.

P.S. In case you missed it last month, the Higurashi manga was licensed by Yen Press, and will begin serialization in their new magazine Yen Plus, starting from July 29.

The two Kill Bill movies directed by Quentin Tarantino will soon be re-released together, with some added story in between them, presented in the form of another anime sequence. So says lead actress Uma Thurman, according to MTV Movies Blog (via ANN), who further speculated that this second anime short will focus on Bill's character. The first one was about Lucy Liu's character, O-Ren Ishii, if you recall...

“Right now [Tarantino] is putting the two films together with an intermission with an added anime sequence he had already written", she said of the ongoing saga of Beatrix Kiddo. “So additional stories are in there, in animation.”

MTV's assumption that this new animation will be about Bill is based on something Tarantino said about two years ago, that he wanted to make two more anime shorts: one about the origin of The Bride, and the other about Bill. In this week's article, however, Uma Thurman says it pretty loud and pretty clear - "It has nothing to do with me. It has to do with another character. You’ll have to see". I'm sure we will...

Getting over the silly description given to this project (kind of hard to imagine a 2D live-action movie), Variety broke the news that the Ghost in the Shell manga / anime series will be adaptated into a live-action movie by Steven Spielberg's company DreamWorks. A movie which, obviously enough, will feature a certain amount of CG imagery, which would explain the pleonastic association of "3D" and "live-action".

Anyway, there's no point in getting over-hyped about this just yet, even if Spielberg himself would direct the movie adaptation (which is in no way official, at this time); and even though he claims that "Ghost in the Shell is one of [his] favorite stories". Keep in mind that we are talking about Hollywood here, and I seriously doubt that anyone there can adapt a Japanese franchise into anything other than a 3D pile of live-action crap. Like that future Akira movie announced a couple of months ago, most probably.

Yay, CAPCOM, our all-time favorite Japanese publisher. As we all know, amongst other exquisite gaming francises, there is this thing called Street Fighter, which will turn twenty real soon. For this awesome birthday, CAPCOM is preparing lots of goodies. Later this year, Street Fighter 4 will be released in Japan, bringing even more instant pew-pew action to all arcade fighting games fans out there.

We will also have a live action movie, set to be released sometime in 2009 (and no, I ain’t talking about that Jean Claude Van Damme bullshit that astonished us all due to its massive amount of gayness), and for that, CAPCOM confirmed the movie’s main cast.

Kristin Kreuk (whose hawtness is NOT debatable) will play our beloved “watch my foot as it breaks your neck” Chun-Li, while Michael Clark Duncan and Neal McDonough will make up for the usual lack of real men in this sort of movies. How good they will do it, it remains to be seen. The Street Fighter movie will be developed with the aid of Hyde Park Films, and it will be published by 20 Centuries and a Rabid Fox.

The official press release can be found here.

What? No Chi-Chi this year? Aw, bummer... I obviously couldn't care less that the Dragon movie itself is being delayed from this August 15, all the way to April 3, 2009 - according to this ComingSoon story. But Jamie Chung's loli character might have been a nice distraction from the hardships of our oh-so-stressful lives. *sigh*... Now I'll have to decide which anime to re-watch instead. Whatever shall I do!

P.S. On second thought, I shouldn't worry. My comrade will probably make me watch one of his stupid Rocky movies or some boring Jet Li pew-pew. Nem fáj!

This calls for a "WTF napkin"... Surely, you've heard of - and quite possibly seen - the classic anime, Akira. It's only one of the most influential (and brain damaging) animations in history, after all (does anyone actually have the balls to say they understood it?). So let me ask you - rhetorically - what the fuck are the Americans thinking, adapting it into live-action movies?! Indeed, fellow lolicons, the unthinkable was revealed by Variety (via ANN), who say that Warner Bros. and Leonardo DiCaprio's money laundering production company Appian Way will be adapting Akira into two movies, the first of which is to premiere in the summer of 2009.

The way the filmmakers describe them is as "Blade Runner" meets "City of God". But with a cheesy hollywoodian twist, because there won't be any more "Neo-Tokyo", like in the original manga / anime. Oh no, to make things even more perplexing, the upcoming Akira movies will take place in "New Manhattan", a metropolis that was rebuilt after being destroyed 31 years ago. And hell knows what other changes they have in mind... Well, unless they decide to substitute that filthy biker gang with some hawt lolis, I really don't see any reason for this crap-film being made.

I haven't given this movie much thought since my comrade last mentioned it, back in May. But now that we have some pictures to feast our eyes upon, I might just keep a closer eye on Blood: The Last Vampire. Thanks to Twitch, we can present you with this lavish collection of photos presumably taken during the shooting of the film, and "leaked" on a Chinese forum. Among others, they are showing Jun Ji Hyun (Giana Jun) who plays the half-vampire loli Saya in the movie, and Koyuki (from The Last Samurai) as the vampire diva Onigen.

As a quick reminder, the live-action movie is an adaptation of Production I.G's Blood: The Last Vampire animated film from 2000, and it should premiere sometime this year.


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 Continue reading 'Blood: The Last Vampire Movie Photos'...

This week marked the premiere of the over-hyped Cloverfield movie (see the trailer on TVkon if you don't know what the fuss is all about), but it seems there's more to it than meets the eye on the big screen. Specifically, the Cloverfield Clues fansite noticed that there's already a Cloverfield: Kishin manga posted online by Japanese manga publisher Kadokawa. This is only the first chapter (from a total of four), and it's about a Japanese high school boy named Aiba, whose fate is tied to the apocalyptic events that take place in New York, in the movie. The next chapter will hit the internets at the end of February, but each time a new one comes out, the previous will be taken down. So enjoy it while you can, with the help of this rough translation from myOtaku.

The upcoming Dragonball movie has just moved out of my "ignore list", now that the actress playing Chi Chi (Goku's loli) has been revealed to be Jamie Chung, according to the Hollywood Reporter. You might know her already if you used to watch MTV's "The Real World", and recently it was also announced that she would star in some TV series called Samurai Girl.

But getting back on topic, let's not forget that Chi Chi is only about 12-years old in the original Dragon Ball anime (as opposed to her older self from DBZ), so hopefully this will also stay true for the movie. Granted, Chung will need plenty of make-up and some really tight bra to make her look like a loli... but meh, I guess a not-so-flat chest is fine, too!


More recent reports claim that filming will only being in January (once upon a place in Mexico), and that the Dragonball movie will be released on August 15, 2008.