a fan's perspective

An overview of the con from the view of our primary photographer this year, from panels to main events to the people. Includes thoughts on a few of the problems of the con, and the reason why it's still worth going back.

I cannot believe I have spent 5 years of my life dealing with anime... Anime Expo 2002 was my 6th time returning to the Southern California July 4th anime getaway, and my 10th convention overall. I have calculated that I have spent 30 days of my life going to these conventions - a whole month. I am sure I have been involved in this too long for my own good, but I will deny it to the bitter end ^_~.

Instead of going through a day-by-day account of my feelings of the convention, however, I will just try to keep it to an overall perspective. I have come to the conclusion that I cannot remember each day's individual events anyway, so I might as well just blob them all together.

[ The Crowds ]

The idea that Anime Expo is a large convention is an understatement. Anime Expo is huge. Even with the large amount of area dedicated for the convention, I still found a crowd just about everywhere I went. You could not go anywhere around the convention center and the hotel lobbies without finding someone around doing something.

Many people are projecting that Anime Expo 2002's attendance numbers overall will probably exceed 15,000 people. That would put the growth of the convention at around a modest 15% at minimum. I personally am willing to believe that Anime Expo had closer to around 17,500 people attending, which would be much closer to about 35% growth. Of course, with the large crowd came some of the inevitable problems that come with having so many people at an anime convention...

[ Sellout ]

As Gideon so neatly pointed out in part 1 of his article series, the convention has become more like a trade show than anything else, seemingly staffed by people who are motivated by corporate sponsorship and size over everything else. As a result, many of the happenings of the con smelled of crass commercialism. From the column of the dealers' room sign promoting the Gundams on display at the Bandai booth, to the sponsorship of the individual programming rooms by companies such as Gutsoon! Entertainment and Funimation, to the decorative lights in the theatre spreading with the logos of ADV Films and Suncoast, you could not walk around the convention without being bombarded by advertisements.

This is not a completely bad thing, of course. I really do not mind Anime Expo becoming like a trade show. However, it does make me long to get back to places like Fanime or Ani-Magic, where the sponsorship is not so blatant, and incidentally, also do not feel as crowded.

[ The Dealers' Room ]

The most obvious problem with the convention due to size (I emphasize due to size: the anime music video contest's problem was not a size matter ^_~) was the dealers' room. The lines to get into the dealers' room meant I got exactly 2 chances to get in. The first time was late evening during the first day. The second time was the afternoon of the third day. The worst part of the whole ordeal was that to get in on that third day, I had to wait in line... for 90 minutes! This was not the first part of the morning, when the dealers' room line is expected to be crowded. This was at 3:00PM! This is usually the time when the dealers' room has enough room to accomodate anyone who wants to go in. Instead, the line stretched outside, and around for at least about 400-500 feet.

There were complaints that the dealers' room this year was smaller than the room last year. While that is quite probable, it would still be hard to deny that even if the dealers' room was in the other room, there would still be a line wait of at least 45 minutes. Simply put, too many attendees meant that it was nearly impossible to get in and out of the dealers' room in a time-efficient manner.

Of course, once I did get in, the dealers' room was magnificent. The booths of the large companies (ADV, Pioneer, Bandai) reminded me a lot of the booths I saw on occasion at E3: large, showy, and always crowded ^_^;;. Anyone who saw the Hellsing display at the Pioneer booth or saw the spectacle of the crowds whenever ADV started throwing T-Shirts off the top of their booth knows exactly what I mean. The other retailers still had plenty of stuff to show off, in the form of neat merchandise and reasonable prices. I am still wondering if I should have picked up that Comic Party UFO catcher doll collection at Anime Jungle's booth (however, since their retail location is only located about a 10 minute walk from my work, I did not see missing that purchase as much of a problem). ^_^

[ The Panels ]

By my count, I attended 2 guest of honor panels, 2 fan panels, and a handful of industry panels. All seemed to be fairly well run.

This year, the Guest of Honor panels switched away from the strict raffle systems for autographs they had used for the last few years. Instead, they implemented a priority system for a handful who won the ticket raffle (in the case of the character designers and Watsuki-san, this also meant sketches ^_^), and for the rest of the fans, as long as you attended the panel, it became first come, first served. While this system feels at least a bit more fair than the system they had in place, I still could not help but notice the size of the constant crowd upstairs, waiting for both autographs and the film room.

The "Academic Study of Manga, Anime, and Fandom" panel proved to be somewhat interesting. It has always been a thought for me to seriously study the medium in a research fashion, and the panel covered this. The yaoi/yuri panel was also interesting, for a quite *ahem* different reason... I still cannot get a grasp on why the fans of this subculture think/feel/act the way they do. Perhaps further research on my part is needed (Seriously. I generally do not read much of the material, though I am starting to think that I will need to do so to understand the community).

Of course, the industry panels were interesting, because of the large number of announcements they made. Since I plan to write something separate about the acquisitions, I will hold off on my full thoughts on them. All I will say here is that of the industry panels, the Pioneer & Bandai panels were the most entertaining. Pioneer definitely ran away with the most exciting announcements of the convention, and Bandai ran away with the most excited industry panel (oh, what crazy things people will do for a T-shirt).

[ The Yoko Ishida Concert ]

Over time, I have come to regret missing the Yoko Kanno concert at Anime Expo in 1999. So with that as a bad memory, I justified myself by going to the Yoko Ishida concert. I was quite familiar with the songs she had sung for anime series (most memorable being the Sailor Moon R ending song, Otome no Policy), and had listened to many of the songs off of the Parapara MAX albums that she sang on.

To hear and see her in concert was exhilarating (though I wish that more of my pictures had come out better ^_^;;). It was a high energy concert, as was to be expected (she was singing mostly Eurobeat-style), with plenty of parapara dancing from the backup dancers.

Since Anime Expo had been without a concert from any Guest of Honor since, well, 1999, it was nice to see them put a concert back in. Let us all hope that Anime Expo decides to hold another concert when they return to Anaheim next year.

[ The Masquerade ]

While many will disagree with me (there is an amount of disagreement from the other editors and writers especially), I still argue that the masquerade has done well over these last 2 years. Anime Expo has made a lot of effort in coordinating the masquerade so that it runs pretty much on time and handles the crowd that it gets effectively.

This year, the masquerade started only about 15 minutes late (which in my opinion, is still more on time than late, considering how late the masquerade had started back in 1999 - about 3 hours), and still ran without a major hitch. While the programming staff STILL does not allot enough time for the masquerade on the schedule (3 hours? - try 4), it was still run at a sufficient clip. While the restriction that there be no on stage microphones and that skits cannot exceed 2 minutes proves to be a pain probably for many of the entrants, I think it works well (only 2 groups tried to pull off everything without a mike, and both failed miserably). For all it is worth, though, even with the limitation, the thing still runs long.

We can only hope that there is someplace within the Anaheim Convention Center that can accomodate all the people that want to watch the masquerade. But being realistic, there probably is not.

[ The Auctions ]

I really have to stop going to these things. The main advantage to going to the auctions is that since they do not clear the auditorium between the auctions, the awards ceremony, and closing ceremonies, going to the auctions generally insures good seating. Of course, the main disadvantage is that if you have money, and you see some of the stuff that they auction off, you might as well kiss some of that cash goodbye.

I could not stop myself from buying a copy of the .hack//SIGN proofs that were auctioned off... It is sometimes hard to believe that anyone could justify paying $150 for 3 prints, color laser printed onto good laser paper, with Mashimo's signature on them... Yet somehow, at an Anime Expo auction, I can justify it.

I am surprised, however, by how low the final bids really came down to. The most expensive item of the whole auction, the Watsuki colored sketch of Kenshin, went only for about $6000. Just for comparison, in 2000, the Madoka Ayukawa sketch that was done by Takada Akemi went for the convention record amount of $13000. While that year, the total auction proceeds exceeded $60000 for the City of Hope, this year the charity proceeds for the New York Times' 9/11 fund was just over $20000. I wonder where the deep pockets went off to... Maybe they are all saving their money to bid at Anime Expo New York.

[ The Cosplayers ]

One of the most obvious sights at any anime convention are the cosplayers. Of course, Anime Expo always abounds with cosplayers in costume, from the simple, to the ridiculously complex (I still shudder to think about how much work goes into some of those full body costumes - it must take them forever).

This year, the cosplayers were out in force. While I still did see my share of relatively simple, cheesy getups, I did notice that there were a lot more cosplayers this year wearing ludicrously complex costumes.

Always impressive, you can see a few of them in the picture gallery on this site.

[ Overall Impression ]

It is hard to tell what my overall opinion of this convention is relative to previous years. Every year I have been to Anime Expo, it has been very large (chalk this up to the fact that I did not attend Anime Expo in 1996 - from what I hear, it was the last year that this convention was not this crowded).

I started to get the feeling that the convention was getting too large for the volunteer staff to handle and adapt to in 2000. I still strongly feel this now. I did not feel quite as comfortable around this con as I did even in 2001, and the size of the crowds definitely did not help.

Does this mean that i will not go to Anime Expo in 2003? No, of course not. It is still the local convention for me. Even if it is a lot more like a trade show now than ever, it is still worth going to. I can justify trying to get into E3, so I can definitely justify going to Anime Expo.

However, does this make it my favorite con? Probably not. While Ani-Magic also has its problems in being run, the fact that the convention is small and out of the way makes it more favored than Anime Expo. Fanime would be the same, except that the fact that it is 8 hours away hurts its importance to me.

Anime Expo, however, is still enjoyable, even if stupidly overcrowded and run like it is ready to spread into a mass riot.

See you at Anime Expo 2003. Destination: Anaheim, CA.

—jason