The bearded one himself, George Lucas, was in Vegas over the week to premiere a 5-minute clip from the upcoming “Star Wars: The Clone Wars”, which according to Lucas, is set between the events of the second and third movie (i.e. the prequels, not the original ones). As for the animation style he’s using, he describes is as “stylized”, and “Gerry Anderson style”. Empire also got him to talk more about the upcoming live-action Star Wars series that he’s planning. Read on.

Geez, remember the first “Heavy Metal” movie in 1981? Or the sorta sequel in 2000 starring Julie Strain? Well forgot those, because they’re making another “Heavy Metal”, to be based on the ’70s sci-fi fantasy magazine of the same name. This latest “Metal” animated movie has some big guns behind it, too — namely director David Fincher, who along with 8 (or 9, they still haven’t settled on the total yet) other filmmakers, will be contributing individual segments to the movie, to be produced by Fincher, Kevin Eastman, and Tim Miller. Best news? They’re looking at an R-rated movie.

USA Today has got your first look at the upcoming Dreamworks sci-fi animated movie “Monsters vs. Aliens”, a spoof on the old ’50s sci-fi movies about invading aliens. The 3-D animated movie is scheduled for March 27, 2009, but first it’ll be shown to future distributors at ShoWest in Las Vegas later today. Jeffrey Katzenberg, Dreamworks’ animation chief, is calling the movie not 3-D, but rather “ultimate 3-D”, whatever that means.

To be perfectly honest with you, I’m still not sure why George Lucas is making a feature length animated film based on that whole “Clone Wars” stuff and releasing it into theaters. But I guess he reckons his Star Wars fans will watch pretty much anything he puts out with the “Star Wars” stamp on it; otherwise, why would anyone make his prequels hits? Those movies were Godawful. Anyways, here’s the poster for the upcoming “Star Wars: The Clone Wars” animated movie.

Speaking of The Spectacular Spider-Man, he’s coming to TV in an all-new cartoon from the WB, and will be joining the network’s Saturday Morning Line-up right before The Batman, which has its series finale (re: its very last episode) the same week that The Spectacular Spider-Man will be debuting — this coming Saturday, March 8, 2008. You will be seeing villains like Doctor Octopus, Electro, Vulture, Venom and Sandman making the webcrawler’s life miserable, but isn’t that half the fun? Some images from the upcoming TV show below.

The Batman is closing up shop on the WB’s Kids programming line, and he’s going out with a bang. Or, specifically, a 1-hour finale that will guest-star the Justice League, as an alien menace called The Joining steals the League’s powers and transfers them to android versions. It’s up to the Batman and Green Arrow, the only two non-powered members of the League, to save the day. Check out some artwork from the The Batman series finale. One word: Holy crap, it looks fantastic!

Pixar’s “Wall-E” doesn’t open until June 27, 2008, but here’s your look at the film’s final poster (thumbnail to your left, bigger version below). Not exactly a mind-blowing poster, but well, it’s for a computer animated movie, so what do you expect? It sells what it needs to sell — a CGI movie by Pixar about a robot named Wall-E. ‘Nuff said.

In recent years, Marvel has been giving DC a run for their money on the big screen. Besides a couple of exceptions, most notably the “Batman” franchise, Marvel’s comic book-to-movies have overwhelmed their DC rivals by a healthy margin. But that isn’t the case on the small screen, where DC still dominates. But what about on DVD? That is where the new battleground is between the two companies.

A new image (at least as far as I can recall) from the upcoming Pixar CG animated movie “Wall-E”. Who wants to bet against this movie earning a couple of hundred million in its first few weeks?

New Line Cinema’s CG-animated sci-fi film “Planet 51″ has just gotten its cast — Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Jessica Biel, Seann William Scott, and Justin Long have all signed on to voice major characters in the upcoming animated movie, which sees Johnson as an Earth pilot who crash lands on an alien planet paranoid about an alien invasion.