We've reported on the difficult progress of David Fincher's Heavy Metal reboot pretty much since news of it came about. Last July Fincher was wrangling with Paramount about the adult content of the proposed re-boot/remake; by mid-December things were yet worse, with Paramount washing their hands of the project and Fincher quoted as saying: "The world will at some point be ready for something other than singing, furry f**king animals."

Six months on again, and a new slate of absolutely stellar directors have suddenly joined the project. The big question is exactly what will be done with the cachet that the likes of James Cameron, Gore Verbinski and Zack Snyder bring to Heavy Metal?

Because these are the kind of people - most especially Cameron - that can get things moving…and that can keep the most pestilential of the studio execs out of the 'creative' meetings, if they want to. Heavy Metal V2.0 now has a dream team. Any better, you'd have to bring Kubrick back from the dead.

If these people really understand what Heavy Metal's legacy is, either they're taking a big chance with their careers, they're not intending to deliver that legacy on screen or (and this really seems too much to hope for) they're going to use their cinematic clout to kick the kids out for a couple of hours and let the adults play with the toys for a while.

Heavy Metal magazine
Growing up in the seventies, Heavy Metal really was the 'forbidden fruit' of fantasy comic books. The existentialism of the original French Metal Hurlant ('Howling Metal') magazine was transferred largely intact to the American version, which revelled in that European sense for nudity (including, but not predominantly, full-frontal male nudity) and risqué visuals, and added to it a huge dose of counterculture. 'Dose' is a good choice of words, because barely an issue of Heavy Metal passed without depicting some kind of drug use.

Violence too - in among the spaceships, seminal design and bizarre civilisations, brains were splattered without compunction, and bones broken. You could turn the page and see literally anything on the next; pretty rare in comics, even for the seventies.

Heavy Metal also flirted extensively with S&M at various points in its most influential run, a trend which manifested in the 'Taarna' sequence in the 1981 Ivan Reitman adaptation.

The mag proved a 'safe zone' for artists and writers with wild imaginations to let themselves push their creative pedal to the floor throughout the 1970s and 80s. The short comic stories therein (combined with long-running serials such as Rich Corben's Den/Neverwhere) ranged from conventional sci-fi to post-modern irony to pure Zen. The mag's anarchic eclecticism, eroticism, sense of daring and total lack of respect (and frequently of taste) was the exact polar opposite of the current movie-climate in corporation-owned Hollywood. To put it in less favourable terms: Heavy Metal's mixture of lust, misogyny, alienation and introspection was 'punk rock' for nerds.

The design legacy of Heavy Metal
The 'respectable' aspect of the mag remains the huge influence it had on the wave of science-fiction and fantasy films that followed Star Wars, and on design in general. The recursive patterns of Heavy Metal stalwart Jean 'Moebius' Giraud adorn both the Nostromo's corridors and spacesuits in Ridley Scott's Alien, for instance.

The sexy, bizarre and mildly psychotic output of Esteban Maroto and H.R. Giger (also sequestered into Alien) added to the graphic soup that would go on to inform Blade Runner, Escape From New York and literary SF such as William Gibson's Neuromancer.

But if you strip away the anarchy and edginess from Heavy Metal, all you're left with are a bunch of Dick-esque mindf**ks and some production design that has already been warmed over several times in movies of the last thirty years. It's like taking the walls down and still hoping to admire the wallpaper. I'm not sure that's worth spending $50 million on - but I do wonder if even James 'God' Cameron can get a faithful Heavy Metal movie made…

If the movie were to stay even partially faithful to the comic, the drug-use alone would earn it an NC-17 (the Plutonian Nyborg 'nose-dive' scene in the original 1981 movie is frequently removed for TV, and represents many other similar instances from the comic). Never mind the women being whipped (and the ones whipping them), the full-frontal male and female nudity and the cascade of broken skull fragments.

Heavy Metal told many of its strange stories through a hormonal, adolescent haze. The preponderance of huge-breasted space-women made enough of a mark on the culture to inspire South Park's loving parody of the 1981 movie in last year's season 12 episode Major Boobage.

None of this is a problem, not even the drugs. There's an 18-25 demographic ready to make Fincher's dream profitable, as proved by any number of goofy Hollywood comedies of the last six or so years.

What's a problem is that Heavy Metal is envisaged as a CGI movie in a climate where CGI animation is almost exclusively associated with output for children. And it's a safe bet that the kiddies are going to want to see Heavy Metal, just as they wanted to see Ralph Bakshi's Felix The Cat, back in the 1970s.

There's something uniquely subversive about using cartoons to convey adult content; the likes of Robert Crumb and Eric Stanton were far more notorious than peers who treated of the same things with photography, fiction or even movies.

The task therefore facing Fincher, Cameron et al is nothing less than reclaiming a kids' medium for adult use; and they have to do it in the face of potentially overwhelming kid-interest in a movie not remotely suitable for kids. If that movie should end up 'PG-13'd to hell, then it's not Heavy Metal - the 1981 film remains 'R' rated in the US, despite more discreet treatment of Den's member than Doctor Manhattan got in Zack Snyder's Watchmen.

Snyder is undoubtedly the director bringing the most relevant experience to this project. Watchmen drew on an intelligent, adult-aimed comic strip with abundant sex, violence and philosophising - all hallmarks of the original Heavy Metal oeuvre, and most agree that Snyder did as much justice to his source as was achievable (fake alien squids aside).

That said, when considering Heavy Metal as a commercial prospect, whatever damage Drag Me To Hell's PG13 rating did to that film's box-office is off-set by the heart attack Warner Bros went through gambling $150 million on Snyder's 'adult' comic-strip adaptation - one a lot milder than Heavy Metal.

The guy we can trust
In the end, it's James Cameron's producer-friendly seal-of-approval that makes me fear the new Metal film may end up hamstrung and untrue to its origins, nothing more than a portmanteau SF outing with some cool visuals (that would be welcome enough, given the talents involved, but it would need to be released under some other, more appropriate banner: Twilight Zone, perhaps…?).

Cameron's work to date suggests he'd be far more interested in the future-tech aspect of the Heavy Metal world than the anarchic libertarianism that framed those visuals back in the seventies and eighties. The characters in his segment are more likely to get blown away than blown.

But will Hollywood's golden boy have to vouchsafe naughty old David Fincher and the other schoolboys with their noses pressed up against the pristine nursery of CGI animation...and getting ready to spray-paint the walls?

US adult animation: not much precedent
It's hard to say whether anyone ever went broke making full-length adult animation features in the US, as Ralph Bakshi is one of the very few who ever tried. In Europe and beyond (and most particularly in Eastern Europe), animation has not historically been so ring-fenced as the preserve of children. At the same time it never really caught on in mainstream markets; the 85-minute French feature Tarzoon: Shame of the Jungle, for instance, was unsuccessful (except in San Francisco) after being smuggled into the US as an incomplete work in 1975 (it was later released in a slightly sanitised and redubbed version, and fared no better).

It's hard to include the undoubtedly controversial field of Hentai animé in this argument, as the animation processes used to make it are so crude compared to the general standard found in feature-length cartoons; and it's not even remotely in the same league as a full-length CGI motion picture such as the proposed Heavy Metal reboot.

Adult animation with a primarily pornographic intent is - unsurprisingly - episodic in nature no matter from where it originates, which pretty much just leaves Fritz The Cat and the original 1981 Heavy Metal movie itself.

Fritz did well enough to spawn a much-derided sequel in the early 70s, but Bakshi's brief missive on adult animation is a potential warning note to Fincher & Co regarding Heavy Metal:

"When I first got to Hollywood to do the production of Fritz the Cat in 1970, I was greeted by a full page ad in Variety from about 50 well known Hollywood animators who told me I was destroying the Disney image and should go home."

As for Heavy Metal (1981) itself, it was a critical flop and a box-office dawdler. Although it soon found new life on the midnight circuit in the company of The Exorcist, Eraserhead, The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Blade Runner, true cult status eluded it since it wasn't able to partake of the VHS revolution due to music-rights litigation that dragged on until settlement in 1995.

Even the least scrupulous number-cruncher would have to admit that there isn't much historical data to work with in terms of how Heavy Metal V.2.0 might fare on the big screen. Which may well be why Cameron is so interested...

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