Active Anime has posted an interview with FUNimation actress Brina Palencia about her career and taking over the role of Rei Ayanami in Evangelion 1.0.

MYC & Associates has listed off numerous Central Park Media titles up for licensing grabs as CPM is liquidated. The last couple of years haven’t been kind to CPM as the market shifted and licensing expenses rose heavily in Japan which eventually led to bankruptcy. CPM had been expanding their live action (Cat Girl Kiki, Legend of the Doll) and hentai (Chains of Lust, Midnight Strike Force) catalogs heavily with easy-to-release titles when the company was forced to close its doors for good.

Nelvana has confirmed licensing the 51-episode anime series Beyblade: Metal Fusion while at the Licensing International Expo in Las Vegas. The series is a sequel to the Beyblade series featuring kids with spinning tops bashing into each other as they go from tournament to tournament. I don’t recall Spinjas getting a TV series back in the day, the big meanies. Kids today don’t know how easy they have it when it comes to mindless Gotta Catch ’em All shows like this. Back in my day we had Speed Racer, Robotech, and not letting our parents figure out what Liquid Television was for fear of it getting banned. One lives for seeing Æon Flux kick some serious ass.

Marvel has announced the line-up for their 3-issue Strange Tales MAX series coming in September. Junko Mizuno’s manga titles include Cinderalla, Hansel and Gretel, and Princess Mermaid all available in the US from Viz. The full line includes Paul Pope, Peter Bagge, Molly Crabapple & John Leavitt, Junko Mizuno, Dash Shaw, James Kochalka, Johnny Ryan, Michael Kupperman, Nick Bertozzi, Nicholas Gurewich, Jason, and more to come.

David Carradine, most famous for his roles in Kill Bill and both Kung Fu TV series, was found dead in his Swissôtel Nai Lert Park Hotel room in Bangkok. He was in Thailand shooting a new french film titled Stretch at the time of his death.

FUNimation has posted the ninth full episode (subtitled) of their new series Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood in the video section. At the time of this posting, the server is constantly needing to pause and buffer due to traffic. If an ad begins at the start of the episode, you can click the ‘X” in the top right corner. You will skip the ad and get straight to the episode. The episode currently will not let you pause and load the rest of the episode into the player so viewing it — even on a high speed connection — is going to be a pain. You may want to hold out for the FUNi YouTube Channel version.

Upcoming film Mai Mai Miracle, based on the novel Mai Mai Shinko to Sennen no Mahō by Nobuko Takagi, will open in Japanese theaters on November 21st, but the English subtitled trailer is already debuting for the international audience who will catch it in August. Animated by Mad House and directed by Sunao Katabuchi of Black Lagoon fame, we travel back to the Spring of 1955 as we meet Shinko Aoki who likes to imagine the land as it was a thousand years ago. New transfer student Kiiko Shimazu attempts to survive Shinko’s wild imagination as they learn from each other’s strengths.

The Saint Seiya prequel, The Lost Canvas, has a new trailer online at the VAP website. Based on the manga of the same name, we follow Tenma and Alone in the roles of Pegasus Seiya and Hades who will slowly grow into enemies when the Saint Seiya TV series begins. The first volume will ship on Blu-Ray and DVD on June 24th in Japan.

According to the new issue of  Model Graphix,  Hayao Miyazaki is considering a manga sequel to his Porco Rosso work. Porco Rosso: The Last Sortie will feature Porco behind the stick of the Savoia-Marchetti SM.79 in his next mission. Staffer Logan Umemoto visited the Italian Air Force Museum to take references shots of the Caproni Campini to build a scale model for the possible upcoming project.

FUNimation‘s plans of streaming new One Piece episodes for Toei has been put on hold for the near future. FUNi released a statement Saturday concerning their thoughts of the subject.

As anime fans know, FUNimation Entertainment and Toei Animation had planned for the first ever online simulcast of the series ‘One Piece’ tonight at 9:00 pm CDT., just one hour after its premiere on Japan’s Fuji Television. Unfortunately, in the last 24 hours we have determined that the FUNimation servers were compromised, even though we employ strict security standards. An unknown individual accessed and posted episode 403 online and as a direct result of this illegal act, all U.S. and Canadian fans will be deprived of access to this great anime series for the immediate future. We will make every effort to locate and prosecute the perpetrator(s)to the fullest extent of the law and will provide updates regarding this most serious matter.

Now, while this may seem like some 1337 hacker cracked into the FUNi video server, the real truth is a little simpler. A streaming video server stores the real video files elsewhere on the online server. In theory, you can only access the streaming video link and not find out where the real video file is stored. Of course, if you can figure out how to work a torrent file then figuring out where a video is stored is just as simple. Cartoon Network learned this the hard way. As G.I. Joe: Resolute premiered on TV and on their website, an employee would load the next episode or two to be ready to go in a few days. Well, if you use a fairly generic file structure like ASFIX_GIJOE_EPISODE01.FLV for the original file, someone is going to put two and two together to find the other ten videos that may be stored in the same directory. FUNi ran into the same problem by uploading files hours — sometimes days — in advance of when the video would go online. Eventually someone starts posting links to the real video files on different forums and someone else may even upload the video to other streaming servers.

The aftermath of the situation had quite a few videos pulled from the server last night. Phantom would run the front ad and then give an error for the actual show episode, for example. As of right now, One Piece and Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood appear to be the only two shows with its episodes complete pulled off the server still.