on Manga's Korean CG TV Animation Pushed Back to 2011

posted on 2010-01-12 07:24 EST

Deal completed in 2008, but financing only signed in December

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The previously announced Korean animated television adaptation of Masashi Tanaka's Gon manga has been pushed back to the latter half of 2011. The original manga's namesake is an orange dinosaur that lives amongst the rest of nature, long after the Age of Dinosaurs. Tanaka deliberately created the manga without any dialogue to give the animals' interactions and the lone dinosaur's day-to-day life a sense of realism.

The Korean entertainment company Daewon Media has originally completed a 2008 deal with the Japanese publisher Kodansha to animate Gon for a planned 2010 broadcast, but the two had only signed a production financing contract last month. The 3D computer-graphics (CG) animated Gon project

is now slated for television broadcast throughout the world.

The manga debuted in Kodansha's Morning magazine in 1991 and was compiled into volumes starting in 1992. Paradox Press originally published the manga in North America, but DC Comics' CMX Manga have since picked up license and is republishing it from the beginning in a format more faithful to the original Japanese version. Sprite Animations Studios, a studio founded by Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within co-director Moto Sakakibara and other former Square USA employees, announced in 2005 that it was working on a computer-graphics film version for a 2007 release, but the project has yet to materialize.

Source: Shinbunka

Update: Daewon, a Seoul-based meda group, has been involved in licensing translations of Japanese manga and anime, as well as in the production of original Korean manhwa and animation. As the master licensor, Kodansha plans television broadcasts, toys, games, and other diverse forms of licensing in the Japanese marketplace. It also aims to simultaneously publish new editions of the original work and anime tie-in books.