Some key bits of news courtesy of AICN Anime:
Kodansha will be releasing Akira and Ghost in the Shell this fall. Dark Horse lost the rights to those titles a little while back, and I'd heard Kodansha was just going to release them domestically on their own — a good idea, since Dark Horse's localization of the former was apparently an English-relettered printing of a French translation. DH had a very good version of the latter out domestically, but I'm curious to see what the new version will be like and can probably compare notes. My guess is this will be cross-licensed through Del Rey but don't bank on it.
The live-action Akira is also back on the slate. I'm not holding my breath, even if the script is by Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby, they of Children of Men. For the dozenth time, people, why remake something that isn't exactly in need of it?
Speaking of which, the Blu-ray of Ghost in the Shell 2.0 — the remastered version of the original film with new FX &c — just went up for pre-order. It's $20, which is a stupefyingly good price for such a piece of work.
Hm: "Death Note's Takeshi Obata is creating the designs for an anime adaptation of an unnamed 'literary masterpiece.'" I have no idea what that could be, but count me in anyway. Random guess: Tale of Genji? There was one such adaptation before, but it's only slightly less difficult to find than Ambrose Bierce's heat signature.
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I'm not sure I trust that Ghost in the Shell 2.0 Amazon.com listing, since it says it's part of the Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex series and has a running time of 634 minutes (the length of a 26-episode series). This much is clearly inaccurate.
I'd be very surprised if Obata's project is yet another adaptation of The Tale of Genji considering we just got another one of those earlier this year with Genji Monogatari Sennenki from Tezuka Productions and Tokyo Movie. I won't venture to guess what "literary masterpiece" is being adapted, since I can't assume the masterpiece in question is necessarily even Japanese. (He could be working on something for Nippon Animation's "World Masterpiece Theater" series for all I know.)
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Here's the referring page from Blu-ray.com for the GITS BD: http://www.blu-ray.com/movies/movies.php?id=6955 The blurb explains everything.
And if there was a Genji adaptation from Tezuka Pro, then I'm all over that.
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