Saturday, May 12th, 2012
Epipheo spoke with Daniel H. Wilson — Robotics PhD and author of Robopocalypse — to find out how to survive the inevitable robopocalypse, and the result was a very funny animated short.
Relevant: Steven Spielberg will start shooting the film adaptation of Robopocalypse this summer in Montreal. The film is targeting a July 2013 release.
Tuesday, May 1st, 2012
Up until the apparently obligatory (these days) tag at the end, this is a pretty moody, ominous trailer. I feel like studios force trailer cutters to add those things at the end. For lighter action flicks, sometimes it can be a fun little “hey also” to put in at the end, but here, it’s just tacked on, and considering we’ve already seen the flying whatever-it-is (I guess they just call it “the Bat”) earlier in the trailer, it’s kind of pointless.
But whatever. The movie itself looks as promising as it always has — I’m guessing everybody reading this is already on-board or not, and nothing Warner Brothers can show to us now is really gonna sway that. The Dark Knight Rises hits theaters on July 20th, 2012.
Monday, August 8th, 2011
As a huge fan of the 2009 blaxploitation parody Black Dynamite, I’ve been looking forward to the upcoming animated series, coming soon to Adult Swim. AS has kindly posted the unaired pilot to the series, which will
Titmouse, Inc., produced the 11-minute pilot below, which features much of the original film’s voice cast, including Michael Jai White, Byron Minns, Kym Whitley and Tommy Davidson. The animated series is aiming for a Spring 2012 premiere.
(Thanks to Twitch for the heads up.)
Tuesday, July 5th, 2011
KÅji Morimoto is one of my favorite animators whom I’ve never seen a feature by. That’s partly because the only feature he’s done to date is the 1991 Fly! Peek the Whale (an out-and-out kid flick, that I’ve never even seen a copy of), but he’s better known for his animated shorts, anyway.
His most seen short in the US, at least, is undoubtedly “Beyond” from the Animatrix anthology, which was one of that very strong collection’s best. He collaborated with Katsuhiro Otomo for the brilliant “The Order to Stop Construction” in Manie Manie anthology (also known as Neo Tokyo). He did Franken’s Gears from Robot Carnival. He’s also done an OVA series called Eternal Family and — most recently — a short called “Dimension Bomb” for the Genius Party Beyond anthology, neither of which I’ve seen. (A lot of this stuff is pretty hard to find!)
Morimoto has also directed a bunch of J-pop music videos, some of which are gorgeous. His stories have been hit and miss (in the films I’ve seen), but the skill of the animation always impresses me. It’s fascinating work, and it’s all begging to be collected onto one “The Work of KÅji Morimoto”-type set one day.
The reason for this post, though, is a 15-minute short he did back in 1997. Be warned: it’s weird. SFW weird, but weeeeiiiird. (And don’t worry; it’s not all filled with visual noise like the first few minutes. That’s intentional. The video gets perfectly clear after a couple of minutes.
Morimoto is supposedly at work on a feature called Sachiko, but I haven’t heard anything about that in years.
