Elijah Wood and Robin Williams are in negotiations to reprise their penguin alter egos in Happy Feet 2, the follow-up to the 2006 computer animated musical about a young tap-dancing social outcast named Mumble amongst a society of uncannily talented singing penguins. But under the tutelage of some funky fresh penguins including Ramon and the master of funk Lovelace (both voiced by Williams) Mumble gets the courage to be true to himself and his happy feet.

The sequel's story is being kept under wraps but George Miller is writing and directing again.

by Alex Billington

A few people have been asking me what this Battle Angel project listed on James Cameron's upcoming filmography is all about. Here's our chance to explain what the movie is and give you a little update on it. James Cameron spoke with both MTV and MarketSaw recently and gave them each some juicy morsels of information on Battle Angel. The project is an adaptation of Yukito Kishiro's popular manga series from the 90's known as Battle Angel Alita. In short, the futuristic sci-fi manga is about a female cyborg warrior who is rescued from a scrapheap beneath the floating city of Tiphares by a cybermedic expert in the 26th century.

"We're not that far down the line," Cameron said. "We have a very good script and we've done a lot of production design. We've done about a year of production design and we've put together an art reel that shows the arc of the film. It's pretty much just add water and we're ready to go." So maybe Cameron could get to this before he returns to Pandora in an Avatar sequel? Not exactly. "I'm not even sure that I'm going to do that film at this point. I might, I still like it, but it seems like every time I make a movie it changes my perception of what I want to make next," he told MarketSaw. Instead, The Dive is probably Cameron's next.

What is one of the reasons Cameron is holding back on Battle Angel? The technology just isn't there yet.

"The mixture of live-action and CG is a little trickier in 3-D than it is 2-D," Cameron told MTV. "Now we see it's good to have done Avatar first before Battle Angel, because the tricky scenes are where you're blending live-action photography, stereoscopic photography and CG."

"Shooting live stuff in 3-D and then adding CG characters and landscapes beyond that, that's a little tricky," he explained.

You might be wondering why this is a problem if they made Avatar look as good as it does. Well, I have a feeling Cameron wants to make Alita - the cyborg girl - a completely CG character like the Na'vi in Avatar. But most of the movie would be otherwise be shot live action with real actors and real sets. So basically he's combining a completely CGI character with live actors who would be performing a sound stage, which they did a little bit of in Avatar. But he's saying that the technology still needs to progress further for them to be able to actually make Battle Angel. In essence, he wants another brilliant T-1000 character all over again.

That's what I love about James Cameron. Back in 1991 when he was making Terminator 2, he wanted a character that was unlike anything we'd ever seen before, and would look and act exactly like a robot from the future with a metal alloy that could form any shape it wanted. He didn't let technology hold him back and he created a flawless CGI character that still holds up today. Now, I think, he wants to do something similar with Battle Angel and create a CGI cyborg character that feels completely real but is actually just a cyborg. Pretty interesting when you think about it. But will he direct Battle Angel next? Only time will tell!

I barely slept last night. Not because I was out carousing, although I did sip a light beer and nibble taquitos with most of the New York film blogger community, but because I couldn’t get the multi-zillion dollar imagery of James Cameron’s Avatar out of my head.

Instead of sleeping, I replayed scenes in my mind: Jake Sully leaping from his Ikran onto the back of the mighty Leonopteryx, braving the Flux Vortex en route to the Hallelujah Mountains, bonding with the elders at the Tree of Souls, searching for the precious Unobtanium.

Am I poking fun, or am I being sincere?  Let's put it this way - the minute I got home I rewatched the Avatar trailer.  It was the closest I could get to revisiting Pandora.

There’s nothing more Hollywood than a triumph over adversity. On the screen there's a tribe of spry, blue environmentalists defeating a military industrial complex of clobberin’ resource gluttons. Behind the camera is a burdened filmmaker so driven by vision he pours the GDP of several third world nations (again!) into a work with a powerful story and dazzling effects.

You’d never think James Cameron is the guy to lead you into a warm hippie love fest, but damn it if I don’t want to grow a braid so I could plug it into every willowy tree and thumping, furious beast I can find.

James Cameron’s Avatar hums with the kind of perfection where even its faults are, somehow, okay.

I fretted earlier that the dialogue may have been too on the nose. Well, it is on the nose. It may be a blessing. There’s a lot of information coming at you and (heaven help me for saying this) perhaps nuance would only interfere with the ultimate message.  Avatar may have some lackluster dialogue, but it does not have a "bad script."  The story beats are solid and the lengthy running time soars by.

Avatar deals in big, basic themes. Journey. Identity. Justice. Sure, there’s no clever wordplay, but the sophistication exists in the vistas, the landscape, the staggering use of new technology.

Despite quaking with delight each time Princess Neytiri's footsteps caused the soil of Pandora to light up like an interstellar "Billie Jean" video, Avatar isn’t just a triumph for the octoshrooms and thanators. It is Col. Quatrich, so hardass he’ll race right out into the noxious air of Pandora if it means getting the job done. It is Jake Sully, growing frazzled and hirsute transferring between two existences. It is the Na’vi, a peaceful race that has no time for diplomats or scientists but oddly accepts a warrior.

I haven’t been this thunderstruck by a film since Star Trek, heck, since Lord of the Rings. But these were films based on pre-existing material. James Cameron’s Avatar, good ol’ Dances with Smurfs in Space itself, is a whole new world. Welcome to Pandora.

by Brian Quinton

McDonald's Thrill Cards, when combined with a Web cam and free "McD Vision" software, will put customers on Avatar's home planet.

McDonald's is hoping to tap into fan excitement surrounding the new techno-blockbuster movie "Avatar" with some sci-fi flourishes of its own—namely an interactive game that lets players explore the movie's computer-generated planet Pandora and a set of on-package cards that can put them there, at least in virtual space.

The quick service giant's global campaigns around the movie, which opens this Friday, were announced last week in a web conference that included the movie's director, James Cameron ("Titanic", "Alien", "Aliens") and producer Jon Landau. While it will take different forms around the world and link to different menu items, the U.S. marketing will center on McDonald's Big Mac.

From December 18 through January 7, U.S. customers who buy a Big Mac will get packaging with one of 8 different Avatar "Thrill Cards" attached. When these cards are held up to a Web cam, participants can use McD Vision augmented reality software to interact with the lush jungle landscapes generated for the movie.

A related interactive game, PandoraQuest, lets global players find hidden objects in three Pandoran landscapes, winning a membership in the "RDA Research Team" featured in the movie for locating all the items. U.S. players who scavenge successfully will get more than just the honor of joining the team: They'll also unlock bonus features in the form of scenes from the movie.

Players can also use an online version of a PandoraROVR, a transport vehicle seen in the film, to explore the planet on the Web, capturing and sharing images with others.

"Avatar", which will run in 3-D in selected theaters, sets the bar pretty high for customer engagement tie-ins, McDonald's U.S. chief marketing officer Neal Golden said during the conference. That's why the company decided to link it to the Big Mac in North America.

"The Big Mac is all about the thrill of your senses," Golden said. "There's so much going on with the big Mac, we think it's a perfect match for the movie."

Director Cameron agreed that the tech-heavy nature of the McDonald's "Avatar" campaign was suited to the movie's rich computer-generated look, years in development.

"When I set out to write this movie [in 2005], I knew that the [computer generated imagery] was about to create a situation where we could do anything that we could imagine," he said. "McDonald's has stepped up and met that same level. I don't think anyone has seen anything like what they're doing with these tie-ins, the McD vision augmented reality in particular.

Prior to the movie's U.S. debut, McDonald's began running a Twitter-based buzz campaign, asking followers to be among the first 10 entrants to decode daily word scrambles and enter their solutions online. The grand prize for the Twitter campaign is the chance to watch a private screening of "Avatar" over a Big Mac lunch with Landau (even though the producer and Cameron both confessed that they prefer the McDonald's Quarter Pounder.)

During the conference, global chief marketing officer Mary Dillon was asked if big immersive experiences were the promotional ‘wave of the future" for McDonald's, considering both this campaign and last ring "Lost Ring" Olympics tie-in, which became the world's largest virtual role-playing game.

"We are all about relevance and innovation for our customers, and we love to be where our customers are living and playing,' she said. "Certainly the world of social media is hot. So expect to see more of this from us in the future."

Some of the overseas campaigns include other interactive elements. For example, in Germany and the U.K., online players will have the chance to morph photos of themselves into the blue-skinned creatures who dominate "Avatar". Australian customers will get hidden codes on cups and tray liners that will enter them into a McDonald's Avatar sweepstakes.