Astroboy has gone from classic animation to kitchy fashion icon accessory and now thanks to Imagi Animation, he will be returning to media in the form of a feature film.
I have been anticipating this nostalgic piece of my younger days for a while now, hoping to see a teaser trailer, or stills or something. But it seems that someone forgot to pay the staff, so they had to lay off a bunch of people until the cheques clear. Its coming, but right now they can’t pay their staff, so they are getting an involuntary holiday.
So the financially squeezed Hong Kong-based studio responsible for TMNT (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) realized Friday night that it couldn’t make its Los Angeles payroll, called everyone on Saturday and laid off almost 80 union animators out of the 120 staff in the LA office, and halted production on the upcoming CGI-animated feature film Astro Boy for Summit Entertainment. Behind the scenes, the company is privately assuring Summit that this won’t affect the pic’s release this year.
So…. why did you have those animators on the job to begin with if laying them off for a couple months would not affect your release date?
Perhaps they had a few months of room before the deadline that this layoff will eat up?
I hope nothing else goes wrong. I really want to see more about this film, but if they are not working on it, it will be a while before we have news!
