I’m a fan of animated CG films that don’t feature talking animals so I was somewhat bummed out that animation studio IMAGI was scaling back their internal productions. Sure, I tore the hell out of IMAGI’s last film Astro Boy but I was optimistic about the future, in particular the CG adaptation of the classic anime series Gatchaman.
When IMAGI announced their shift in focus from original productions to becoming an animation studio for hire, similar to what happened with Mainframe (ReBoot), no one knew what the fate of Gatchaman was. The film was indeed under production as evident by several teaser trailers and pieces of promo art that was shown at industry expos. But now IMAGI is working on Gatchaman again and we have a brand new trailer for it.
The trailer, which comes from the awesome site Twitch Film, isn’t exactly current footage as it was produced before IMAGI shut down. This fresh look at the film should be pretty indicative of the style and vibe IMAGI is going for, which essentially looks like an updated version of the anime. I must say that the visual fidelity isn’t exactly of the sharpest quality, something that could be attributed to IMAGI having to scale things back due to monetary reasons.
It’s nice to see that IMAGI is still alive and kicking and that they haven’t dropped Gatchaman yet. Chances are the film may still be a hard sell for North American audiences, since it doesn’t have celeb voiced animals, but maybe Gatchaman will be a surprise hit and savior that IMAGI so desperately needs.
