The Hollywood Byte #32: The Animated Castlevania

Separate from the live action Castlevania feature film that Paul Anderson is writing and directing for Crystal Sky Entertainment, Panacea Entertainment and Project 51 have optioned the animated writes for Konami's best-selling game franchise for a pair of animated TV series, as well as straight-to-DVD animated features and theatrical animated films.

Eric Gardner, chairman and CEO of Panacea Entertainment, said that there are plans for two separate "Castlevania" TV series. One animated show will target an older audience, while the other show will be a "softer, 'Castlevania Jr.' series aimed at kids." Gardner expects at least one of these series to be on the air in the U.S. by next year.

"One of the things that drew us to the property was the almost unending possibilities of story lines," said Gardner, who compared the rich mythology to the classic TV series Dark Shadows. "Castlevania covers 600 years and many generations of the Belmont family. It has an incredibly rich vane of characters, story lines, backdrops, settings. There's no reason why it couldn't be taken into the future. There's no reason we couldn't do a story set in 2093."

Renowned comic book author Warren Ellis will pen the stories for the various project and James Jean will serve as art director. Gardner said Jean's award-winning style will bring the "Castlevania" world to life in a new way.

"I think there will be anime elements of it, but it's going to be more hints of anime as opposed to traditional, full-blown anime," said Gardner. "We're hoping it has a very distinctive, unique style that's instantly recognizable as what will become the animated Castlevania brand."

While it's still very early in the production cycle for all of these projects, Gardner believes the kids' show might be a little more anime than the adult-skewing cartoon. While the two shows will have some synergy, for ratings purposes Gardner said the two animated shows will be kept separate.

"I think the shows would be set differently time-wise," said Gardner "They're two different shows, however, if you happen to watch both series, you'll be able to infer the connections between them and maybe even appreciate if we do it as intelligently as we expect to do it, maybe even appreciate the relationships between the characters and the families even though they may be separated by a few centuries."