Next Club Meeting: November 3, 2018,at the Wood Dale Public Library from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
The Animatrix Network is an anime & manga fan club located in the Southwest suburbs of Chicago, Illinois. We usually meet on the fourth Saturday of each month (except when holidays or conventions coincide). The meetings are free and open to the public. Join us for a day filled with anime.
This site provides news, reviews, commentaries, and previews of the world of anime and everything it inspires, such as live-action films, comics, music, art, and other weird things to enjoy and contemplate.
From Disney and visionary director Tim Burton, “Dumbo” expands on the beloved classic story where differences are celebrated, family is cherished and dreams take flight. A new trailer, images and poster are now available. The trailer features Colin Farrell, Michael Keaton, Danny DeVito, Eva Green, Finley Hobbins and Nico Parker.
Circus owner Max Medici (Danny DeVito) enlists former star Holt Farrier (Colin Farrell) and his children Milly (Nico Parker) and Joe (Finley Hobbins) to care for a newborn elephant whose oversized ears make him a laughingstock in an already struggling circus. But when they discover that Dumbo can fly, the circus makes an incredible comeback, attracting persuasive entrepreneur V.A. Vandevere (Michael Keaton), who recruits the peculiar pachyderm for his newest, larger-than-life entertainment venture, Dreamland. Dumbo soars to new heights alongside a charming and spectacular aerial artist, Colette Marchant (Eva Green), until Holt learns that beneath its shiny veneer, Dreamland is full of dark secrets.
When four-year-old Kun meets his new baby sister, his world is turned upside down. Named Mirai (meaning “future”), the baby quickly wins the hearts of Kun’s entire family. As his mother returns to work, and his father struggles to run the household, Kun becomes increasingly jealous of baby Mirai... until one day he storms off into the garden, where he encounters strange guests from the past and future – including his sister Mirai, as a teenager. Together, Kun and teenage Mirai go on a journey through time and space, uncovering their family’s incredible story. Directed by Mamoru Hosoda, and featuring the voices of John Cho, Rebecca Hall, and Daniel Dae Kim.
In theaters starting November 29
An official selection at Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, and the epic capstone of director Mamoru Hosoda’s career, Mirai is a sumptuous, magical, and emotionally soaring adventure about the ties that bring families together and make us who we are.
From visionary filmmakers James Cameron (AVATAR) and Robert Rodriguez (SIN CITY), comes ALITA: BATTLE ANGEL, an epic adventure of hope and empowerment. When Alita (Rosa Salazar) awakens with no memory of who she is in a future world she does not recognize, she is taken in by Ido (Christoph Waltz), a compassionate doctor who realizes that somewhere in this abandoned cyborg shell is the heart and soul of a young woman with an extraordinary past. As Alita learns to navigate her new life and the treacherous streets of Iron City, Ido tries to shield her from her mysterious history while her street-smart new friend Hugo (Keean Johnson) offers instead to help trigger her memories. But it is only when the deadly and corrupt forces that run the city come after Alita that she discovers a clue to her past – she has unique fighting abilities that those in power will stop at nothing to control. If she can stay out of their grasp, she could be the key to saving her friends, her family and the world she’s grown to love.
In Theaters February 14, 2019
Directed by: Robert Rodriguez Screenplay by: James Cameron and Laeta Kalogridis Based on the Graphic Novel ("Manga") Series: "Gunnm" By Yukito Kishiro Produced by: James Cameron and Jon Landau Cast: Rosa Salazar, Christoph Waltz, Jennifer Connelly, Mahershala Ali, Ed Skrein, Jackie Earle Haley, Keean Johnson
[Source: ComicsBeat, written by author Heidi MacDonald] Comics and animation lost another key figure this week. Fred Patton, a protean champion of early anime/manga fandom passed away at age 77 this week. He had been confined to a nursing home after a stroke in 2005, but continued writing and pursuing his interests in anime.
Until then he wrote widely about anime, and you’ll find his byline in many of the same old fanzines I wrote for back in the day.
All The Anime has a fine obituary, including Patton’s key role at Streamline Pictures, one of the first companies to bring Anime to the US:
When Fred turned 50, Carl Macek lured him away from his real-world job into the world of movie-making. Fred became the first employee of Streamline Pictures, with many of his early amateur scripts forming the basis for some of Streamline’s pro releases. Inevitably, he would lock horns with Macek, who would change the dialogue beyond what Fred considered to be a reasonable nuance. Fred would warn him that fandom wouldn’t like it, and as Macek later admitted, Fred was often right. However, Fred also had a fine grasp of the politics of fandom, and was instrumental in decisions designed to avoid what today might be called flame-wars. It was he who brought up the fact that the subject of the first Lupin III film, The Mystery of Mameux, had been so consistently mistransliterated as Mystery of Mamo by American fandom that correcting it would only lead to protests.
Many remembered Patton on social media:
Fred was a regular in my young fan days in Southern California, and I
would always see him at Comic-Con. We actually owned the same shirt
emblazoned with Burne Hogarth’s Tarzan, and he wore his for many years
after I stopped wearing mine. We’d always joke about it. He was a good
guy and very instrumental in the fandom of the day.
Woody has always been confident about his place in the world and that his priority is taking care of his kid, whether that’s Andy or Bonnie. But when Bonnie adds a reluctant new toy called “Forky” to her room, a road trip adventure alongside old and new friends will show Woody how big the world can be for a toy. Directed by Josh Cooley (“Riley’s First Date?”) and produced by Jonas Rivera (“Inside Out,” “Up”) and Mark Nielsen (associate producer “Inside Out”), Disney•Pixar’s “Toy Story 4” ventures to U.S. theaters on June 21, 2019.
KOJI is a Fantasy Adventure show targeted for boys and girls age 6-11+, but aiming to explore themes and topics that relate to people of all ages.
Koji crash lands on a colorful earth-like planet, inhabited by incredible alien creatures and hybrid animals. It's here that he meets Tako, a giant blue cat with water/ice powers, who will become his lifelong best friend.
They journey together to defeat the evil spreading throughout the land, and it's up to them and a few valiant others they meet along the way to put an end to the Robot King and his mechanical army.
Studio Mir is now seeking distribution and financial partners to further bring the world of KOJI to life!
For Distribution Inquiries: studiomir@studiomir.co.kr
In the hands of Benjamin Shine, a piece of tulle isn’t just for making fancy dresses and curtains. Using nothing but an iron, The British artist turns the fabric into amazingly realistic "paintings".
Shine sculpts, presses and pleats the huge single piece of tulle, whose transparent qualities give the portrait more texture and depth. By layering in this way, the artist obtains different tones and shadows that enable him to realistically depict everything from objects to portraits.
From Bergdorf Goodman and Givenchy to Sotheby’s — and across much of the internet — artist Benjamin Shine’s ethereal work with tulle has made him perhaps the foremost fabric sculptor in practice today. Meet with Shine in his studio to see, and try to understand, his process.
[Source: Yahoo!News] Stan Lee, the Marvel Comics godfather who helped create Spider-Man, the Hulk, Iron Man and so many more “feet of clay” superheroes, characters that both reinvented the comic genre and formed the basis for the now-dominant motion-picture form, died Monday, according to TMZ and the Hollywood Reporter. He was 95.
In 2018, as the latest Marvel movie, Black Panther, was winning over audiences and critics, Lee canceled public appearances due to an irregular heartbeat and pneumonia. While he returned to the convention circuit a couple of months later, longtime friends and admirers, such as filmmaker/podcaster Kevin Smith, said they were no longer able to communicate with the comic legend, and a report said a battle over the control of Lee’s estate was underway.
Lee, Marvel’s longtime editor and publisher, was credited as an executive producer on nearly 150 films and TV shows based on Marvel titles, including the billion-dollar-grossing X-Men, Spider-Man, Avengers, and Iron Man franchises. Other productions bearing Lee’s name include the Wolverine, Captain America,Guardians of the Galaxy, Fantastic Four, Hulk, Thor and Doctor Strange films, as well as the Jessica Jones and Luke Cage series.
As of 2017, four of the world’s top 20 all-time box-office hits were based on characters co-created by Lee: The Avengers; Avengers: Age of Ultron; Iron Man 3 and Captain America: Civil War. Many more Marvel movies bearing Lee’s name, if not featuring one of Lee’s signature onscreen appearances, are in the pipeline. In 2018 alone, Lee appeared in Black Panther; Ant-Man and the Wasp; Avengers: Infinity War; and Venom. He will also appear in the untitled Avengers movie, due out in 2019.
“Stan’s impact on popular culture is immeasurable,” Tobey Maguire, star of the 2000s’ Spider-Man movies, once said at a Comic-Con event honoring Lee.
Hard as it was to sum up what Lee meant to what we watch, read and consume, the world kept trying. Lee was presented with the Producers Guild’s Vanguard Award, the National Medal of the Arts and a Disney Legends Award. At age 91, he was placed among Oprah Winfrey, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas on Forbes’ annual ranking of the most influential celebrities.
Lee had an aw-shucks take on his career and legacy: “I’m just a guy who wrote comic books,” he would say.
Lee’s own origin story went like this: He was born Stanley Martin Lieber on Dec. 28, 1922, in New York City. In 1939, when he was 17, Martin Goodman, his cousin Jean’s husband, launched Timely Comics, the forerunner to Marvel. Goodman hired the young Lee to refill inkwells for Timely’s editing team, Jack Kirby and Joe Simon, both already renowned for having created the star-spangled Captain America.
When Kirby and Simon left Marvel in 1941, Lee was transformed like Peter Parker was from nerdy high-schooler to Spider-Man: The former gofer was tapped to be Timely’s lead writer, art director and editor-in-chief. The latter title was something Lee, outside a break to serve in the Army during World War II, would hold until the 1970s.
In the 1950s, Timely, which morphed to Atlas, which morphed to Marvel, churned out monster, mystery and cowboy tales. Superheroes surfaced only occasionally. Marvel was on the ropes, and Lee was bored.
“Around 1960, I told my wife, ‘I can’t stand this anymore,'” Lee said. “…My wife said, ‘If you want to quit anyway, before you leave why not do a comic or two the way you want.'”
Around the same time, Lee would recall, Goodman told his editor he wanted a superhero team-up title, Ã la Justice League of America, a then-hot, new hit for rival DC Comics.
A year later, in 1961, the first issue of The Fantastic Four, co-created by Lee and Kirby, who’d returned to the Marvel fold, was published. The title was unlike anything comic-book fans had seen.
Where the JLA was an all-for-one collective of do-gooders, the Fantastic Four was a group of mutants who bickered.
“I changed the whole line around,” Lee would say. “New ways of [characters] talking, hangups, introspection and brooding.”
Lee’s vision for the superhero came down to this: “Inside their colorful, costumed booties they’d still have feet of clay,” he wrote in his book, Origin of Marvel Comics.
The thinking was revolutionary.
“The beauty of Stan Lee’s characters is that they were characters first and superheroes next,” Jeff Kline, a producer of animated series (Transformers Prime, Dragon Tales), once said. “They never just had superpowers.”
Hulk, Iron Man, the X-Men, the Avengers, Nick Fury, the Silver Surfer, Ant-Man and Black Panther were among the flawed heroes and antiheroes Lee and Kirby cranked out, one after the other, through the early 1960s.
“Lee and Kirby were the Lennon and McCartney of comics,” Dark Horse Comics founder Mike Richardson once told the Los Angeles Times.
With Steve Ditko, Lee co-created Spider-Man, the web-slinging outsider who would become, status-wise, Marvel’s equivalent of Superman. It was Lee who penned, in the very first Spider-Man adventure in Amazing Fantasy No. 15, the words that would famously be boiled down to, “With great power comes great responsibility.”
Lee was front and center as Marvel rose like a rocket, and he became a star (complete with his own catchphrase, “Excelsior!”) to baby-boomer and Gen-X readers of the 1960s and 1970s.
In the 1960s, Hollywood began mining Marvel for fodder for children’s cartoons. As comics moved into the mainstream, Marvel heroes went primetime with the 1970s shows The Amazing Spider-Man and The Incredible Hulk.
Lee’s characters had a tougher time transitioning to the big screen. While DC scored successes with the Christopher Reeve Superman franchise and the Tim Burton Batman movies, Spider-Man and his cohorts languished in development hell. For a time, the most famous Marvel movie was the one that never got released: the low-budget, Roger Corman-branded Fantastic Four. (Lee was not a producer on that fiasco.) In 1996, Marvel filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Then, in 2000, X-Men opened in theaters, and everything changed. The bigger-than-expected hit spawned multiple spinoffs, including the Wolverine and Deadpool movies, and, along with the Sam Raimi Spider-Man that followed in 2002, sent Hollywood on a superhero binge from which it has yet to back away from.
Lee’s name not only appeared in the credits, but the man himself appeared onscreen, a cameo tradition that dated back at least to the 1989 TV-movie The Trial of the Incredible Hulk and will continue with the upcoming Wreck It Ralph sequel, Ralph Breaks the Internet, which open Nov. 21. His 2017 cameo in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 teased that Lee’s omnipresence was due to his being one of the all-seeing Watchers — yet more characters created by Lee and Kirby.
Lee once joked his cameos were the reason the Marvel movies were so successful. “The cameo is very brief,” he said. “Somebody might miss it, you might’ve reached down for popcorn. If you missed a cameo, what do you do? You run to the box office and buy another ticket! So half of the money they’ve made is because of my cameos!”
In 2009, Disney bought Marvel Entertainment, and a price tag was essentially affixed to the characters, adventures and titles that originated at the Lee-era Marvel Comics: $4 billion.
Lee, who stepped down as Marvel publisher in the 1990s, kept a hand in the company as its chairman emeritus. Always a hustler, Lee founded the media company POW! Entertainment and starred in his own reality-TV series, Who Wants to Be a Superhero?.
In 2017, the man who’d left an imprint on so many literally left his prints at the TCL Chinese Theatre. The ceremony was held less than two weeks after Lee’s wife of 69 years, Joan Lee, died at the age of 95.
Lee grappled with claims of elder abuse, which were being investigated by Los Angeles police, in the past year. He was granted a temporary restraining order against a former business manager in June, following a bizarre series of events, including the disappearance of millions from his bank accounts and the sale of his blood to fans. However, he insisted just last month, “There really isn’t that much drama.”
Through it all, Lee showed no signs of slowing down or of losing the ability to spin a good story. Asked once which of his characters was his favorite, Lee answered as any proud parent would: “I love ’em all,” he said.
“Pip” presented by Southeastern Guide Dogs -- A heartwarming tale for underdogs everywhere, Pip is the story of a small dog with a big dream — to become a Southeastern Guide Dog. Does she have what it takes?
The flower 'Sarah', which can not bloom in spring, meets Spring, and they fall in love with each other. Spring and Sarah are inevitably parting as the season passes. Spring leaves Sarah with a butterfly as a sign of love. Sarah waits for her beloved Spring, keeps the butterflies and tries to catch up with the seasons of the summer, autumn and winter, but finally disappears...
Director: Kim Nakagyeong, Yang Narae
Production: Yoo Kyung Kang, Kang Hye Rin, Um Myung Hwan, Hwang Hye Rin, Cha Su Min, Graduated from the Animation School of Culture Industry University in 2016
The Secret Life of Pets 2 will follow summer 2016’s blockbuster about the lives our pets lead after we leave for work or school each day. Illumination founder and CEO Chris Meledandri and his longtime collaborator Janet Healy will produce the sequel to the comedy that had the best opening ever for an original film, animated or otherwise.
The Secret Life of Pets 2 will see the return of writer Brian Lynch (Minions) and once again be directed by Chris Renaud (Despicable Me series, Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax).
