Moto Sakakibara is set to helm the Los Angeles-based Sprite Animation Studios first CG-animated film, Gon, which is based on Masashi Tanaka's wordless manga series about a ferocious one-foot tall dinosaur.  Sakakibara was one of the co-directors of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, the groundbreaking computer-animated film from 2001, which may have been lacking somewhat in narrative terms, but which was a true technical marvel for its time (see 'Final Fantasy DVD Details Set').  The director, who founded Sprite Animation in 2002 with several of his colleagues from the Final Fantasy project, plans to make the Gon feature without dialogue in order to keep it as faithful as possible to Tanaka's surreal vision of a miniature dinosaur loose in the wilds of our modern mammal-dominated world.

Tanaka's Gon was actually the first manga graphic novel published by DC (under the Paradox Press imprint).  If  Sakakibara's Gon film is successful, perhaps we will see new editions of Tanaka's manga available here in the States once again.