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Suppose you wanted to make an animated film or TV series, but you didn’t have any new ideas and (gasp) you don’t want to remake the same old properties. Take heart: there’s a lot of great material out there just begging to be adapted into animation.

Drafthouse Films released the final U.S. trailer today for The Congress, the 2013 live-action/animation hybrid directed by Ari Folman (Waltz with Bashir). In a sign of the times, the film will first be released onto iTunes/On Demand on July 24, followed by a limited theatrical release on August 29, and a New York release on September 5. Not only does the film contain animation, its story, which tackles the ethical and philosphical dilemmas surrounding the use of digital actors, is also relevant to the animation community. The idea was inspired by Stanislaw Lem’s 1970s novel The Futurological Congress: More than two decades after catapulting to stardom with The Princess Bride, an aging actress (Robin Wright, playing a version of herself) decides to take her final job: preserving her digital likeness for a future Hollywood. Through a deal brokered by her loyal, longtime agent (Harvey Keitel) and the head of Miramount Studios (Danny Huston), her alias will be controlled by the studio, and will star in any film they want with no restrictions. In return, she receives healthy compensation so she can care for her ailing son and her digitized character will stay forever young. Twenty years later, under the creative vision of the studio’s head animator (Jon Hamm), Wright’s digital double rises to immortal stardom. With her contract expiring, she is invited to take part in “The Congress” convention as she makes her comeback straight into the world of future fantasy cinema.

A promising trailer was released today for The Congress, the new live-action/animated hybrid directed by Waltz with Bashir helmer Ari Folman. The film will premiere this Thursday at the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar of the Cannes Film Festival. No theatrical release dates have been set so far beyond France, where it will open on July 3.

The Congress is loosely adapted from Stanislaw Lem’s sci-fi novel The Futurological Congress, and follows an aging actress (Robin Wright) who agrees to sell a digital version of herself to a movie studio with the stipulation that she can never act again. The live-action portions of the film also star Harvey Keitel, Jon Hamm, and Paul Giamatti.

The film was produced as a co-production between Israel, Germany, France, Belgium, Poland and Luxembourg, but the creative heavylifting appears to have been done in Israel. Folman’s collaborators on Bashir rejoined him for this film, including animation director Yoni Goodman, production designer David Polonsky
, editor Nili Feller, composer Max Richter and sound designer Aviv Aldema. The Israeli paper Haaretz offers an in-depth article about how the film was conceived and produced.

Does your prose feel boring? Does your fictional world feel shallow? Read some Stanislaw Lem, the Polish master of space stories. You can meet him in this short film that I found on SFSignal.

The movie gives you a groovy look at the life of a Polish writer in the 1970's, as well as a peek at the Andrei Tarkovsky version of Lem's Solaris. Ever since I read his novel Fiasco, I fell in love with Lem's Jorge Luis Borges-laced blend of science fiction. 

I'll never forget the first few pages of Fiasco, where he wrote a couple mind-blowing pages about skimming the surface of a moon inside a gigantic robot. Too much science fiction seems badly-imagined--too many elves and not enough story--but Lem's skinny books hinted at an entire imaginary universe and physics that existed alongside his fiction. 

When Lem died in 2006, Book Ninja collected all the obituaries about this amazing writer.