I'm going to play the world wide web role of Toontown-to-Hollywood Adaptation Consultant here, and speak my mind.
Yeah, the ones highlighted sound pretty cool. Better than that gawdawful Underdog movie anyway. I mean, c'mon, it's a live action "make it's mouth dubbed" dog. How flexible is the friggen thing going to be when you need your big adventure sequences. NONE!!! That's how much. God I hate that element of that film. I DON'T WANT TO watch a live action dog in a stupid little costume for two whole hours, you Hollywood jerks! Underdog was always kinda lame, but that movie made it all the worse...I think future filmmakers will learn from that example though. It's always tough bringing an ink drawing to the third dimension, to say nothing of production design, staging, narrative, storyboard, script, choreography, acting, lighting, digital effects (if there are any. They're not always necessary, even in Hollywood, contrary to popular opinion) and choice of actors for adaptation
I wonder if M. Night can handle the Avatar movie, considering he's never done an epic scale type movie before. It could either be a "taking it to the next level" type thing, or a huge dissapointment. Personally, I hope he hires Yuen Wo-Ping (Wuxia movies, The Matrix, either Jet Li and/or Chow Yun Fat (I forget which one), Kill Bill) or someone like that to do the choreography. That would rock and put me at ease. Anyone less takes the chance of sucking. But back on topic. Will they be good? Hardly anyone knows...I think he has THE POTENTIAL to do something that big in scale, but for staging he seriously needs to hire some right hand man (choreographer). Particularly someone well versed in the martial arts because I doubt M. Night really knows anything about that, Kind of how Yuen-Wo-Ping helped Tarantino with Bill, and the Wachowski bros on The Matrix. I mean seriously, do people actually think Tarantino and the Wachowski just made all those real moves up out of thin air? That they're just that good all by THEMSELVES? Oh please..Ninja Turtles the movie way back in the day did well partially because they hired good choreographers which made the whole movie move in a cool way. And while the Ninja-Turtle-Posse costumes and the Vanilla Ice cameo may look cheesy and creepy today, in retrospect the ninja moves still look good.
The same goes for the live action Dragonball and Akira and potential Cowboy Bebop crew. They had BETTER have already signed on a whole bunch of good traditional East Asian or American action movie choreographers and production designers who know what they're all doing. Whether it's knowing how to help an actor throw a convincing punch, or knowing how to make holding fake firearms in a cool way onscreen. Otherwise they're all screwed because the physical movement will look horribly corny, much like action in non-Tarantino and non-Wachowski / non-Jason-Stathan Hollywood B-grade action type stuff.
Honestly, if you want my real opinion, a film like The Forbidden Kingdom, is a perfect example of a martial arts-action-based Hollyood commercially successful adventure movie gone right, in terms of recent stuff. They hired the right actors and choreographers and cinematographers to make the lighting very low key and just right. Low key lighting is part of what makes it so good. I think even though it's not an adaptation, it did come in at Number One at the Box Office it's first week out the gate (all while looking graceful and cool). Japan is not where you want to look for good live-action action flicks. Hong Kong is. That's where the REAL fighter moves come from. I think Bruce Lee taught us all that. I think the producers of the live action Avatar, DBZ, Evangelion, and Bebop films should learn from a good example like that. Otherwise there would be a huge chance the films could look WAY TOO HOLLYWOOD. And no one wants that, except Hollywood of course. Yuck. Hollywood.
All in all, a Hollywood animation or anime/anime-influenced show-to-movie shouldn't be taken any less serious than any recent video game or literary novel or comic book adaption (like a Frank Miller film, or Iron Man) adaptation would be. But producers in Hollywood need to learn to involve the creative forces behind these animated shows in supervision roles to see a smooth transition. If anyone understands the world from a creative and design perspective, it would be the animation studios and creative teams that produced the work these upcoming movies are based on. It's really only fair. However not everyone working in animation understands the technical aspects of live action filmmaking the way, say Tim Burton, Quentin Tarantino, and Steven Spielberg all do, even though all three of the people I just mentioned have either worked alongside animation studios or worked for or with them (i.e. Burton with stop motion and Spielberg with Warner Brothers) (Tarantino, though he doesn't draw, basically oversaw the production of the O-Ren sequence in Kill Bill by Production IG. He'd have to. He's the film's director, even if he didn't know much about Production IG in the beginning and doesn't draw himself. He understand the value of I.G.'s filmmaking though, even if he doesn't actually work in animation...)
But then again, what do I know. A good animation auteur doesn't always make the transition from animation to film like Tim Burton has been able to. The dude just makes it all look so easy! But then there's the traditional anime directors of the world, who are geniuses at making animation, but their live action work is near unwatcheable (I hate naming names for an example like this, but, Mamoru Oshii's live action films anyone? live action renditions of anime, which is also television anime, are very popular in Japan, if I am not mistaken, so they're technically already doing stuff like this particular brand of adaptation over there.) Everything is relative in terms of who does what the best. Some people who are good at one thing fail miserably at another. No one in Hollywood or Tokyo is good at everything, even if some people make it look otherwise...
Hey, maybe that film class I took a while ago IS paying off. Maybe I DIDN'T waste my money on skills I'll never use AFTERALL. Hooray!
