'Professor Layton' film gets American go-ahead

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Professor Layton and the Eternal Diva, an animated film based on the Nintendo DS puzzle adventures, is to receive an official North American DVD release later this year.

Set between the first two games in the series, the feature-length anime was made available in Japan on December 19, 2009, and in Europe during October of the following year.

Pacing in The Eternal Diva is such that viewers have time to try and figure out some of the puzzles confronting Layton and chums before the cast themselves do so.

Whereas Manga Entertainment UK and Kazé handled the European releases, Viz Media will be bringing The Eternal Diva to North American shores.

Other game-to-anime conversions include Dead Space: Aftermath and Dante's Inferno: An Animated Epic, which supported releases of their 2010 counterparts.

Halo Legends did the same for Halo: Reach with a compilation of animated shorts, in the style of The Animatrix.

The long-running Pokémon series has been particularly successful at straddling both games and animation: Pokémon Red and Green debuted in 1996, with the corresponding TV series bounding onto Japanese networks in 1997.