Industrial Light & Magic, the industry's oldest and most successful effects house, has embarked on their first fully computer generated feature film. The film, tentatively titled FRANKENSTEIN, will be an animated followup to the 1931 classic film with Boris Karloff.

ILM will be producing the film for Universal, based on a script by S.S. Wilson and Brent Maddock, who also wrote one of ILM's current projects, WILD WILD WEST.

Maddock told Variety: "Universal wants something new in animation. They want a fairly dark, edgy cartoon that will be genuinely scary, and that was what attracted us. How scary can a cartoon be? We're going to find out." The filmmakers will be looking to make a genuinely scary film, but not gory or upsetting to family audiences.

FRANKENSTEIN is scheduled to enjoy a release for October, 2000. Along with FRANKENSTEIN, plenty of other fully CG feature films are in the works, including Pixar's A BUG'S LIFE and TOY STORY 2, and Pacific Data Images' ANTZ and SHREK. The buzz is that there may be more big announcements of effects houses producing CG features, as well.