Anime Boston Day 1
Well, Boston was blessed enough to have a gaming convention then an anime convention on back to back weekends, both at Hynes Convention Center, conveniently enough. Naturally I took the day off work to attend day 1.
That's dedication!
First of all, there were a LOT more cosplayers in this con than at PAX East. You can see that in my Picasa Web Album. Expected, I guess, since PAX East is a more professional con with a lot of journalists and media, where as Anime Boston is more fan-oriented. I’d guess a good 75-80% were cosplayers. I was not one of them, though I did take photos of them.
Some of my favorites were:
- Master Roshi from Dragon Ball, who did 2 great poses.
- Lots and lots of Vocaloids. I’m probably a little behind, but I’m getting into Hatsune Miku, so I was happy to see that.
- A real gender-bending Senou Natsuru from Kampfer.
- A bare- and hairy-chested Sora from Kingdom Hearts Tidus from Final Fantasy X (thank you, Marx-Taich0u).
- The sole Bakemonogatari cosplayer that I could find, Hitagi Senjougahara. She had unfortunately forgotten her stapler, but she did have 2 pairs of scissors.
- Everyone posted on this very page.
There are plenty of other very good ones, so, again, just go to my Picasa Album.
Spoilers!
I did go to some panels, but most of them were pretty uneventful. I did go to one run by Alex Leavitt, the MIT researcher who had the talk on memes at PAX East last weekend (he’s running a total of 8 at Anime Boston – check out his blog), on anime OPs and EDs, which was pretty fun. He did a good job summing up the various styles of OPs depending on the anime genre, showing off some interesting, more out-there ones (nothing by Shaft, I’m sorry to say), and some ones that the US really butchered.
A real beauty, I'd say
But the rest were pretty meh. There was a talk titled “Vile Spectre of Moe,” which amounted to little more than one guy ranting against moe and calling its fans losers, without going into much detail as to why moe was so abhorrent or how the phenomenon had seeped into the otaku/anime culture. Half the talk was him talking about the glory days of the 60s-80s when anime was good.
The Life and Times of Akiyuki Shinbo was one that I had high hopes for, because Shinbo is one of my current favorite directors. If you don’t know him, he’s directed virtually everything by Shaft in the past few years, excepting the Ef series and the latest season of Hidamari Sketch. That means things like Pani Poni Dash!, all 3 seasons and various OVAs of Sayonara, Zetsubou Sensei, the still-unfinished Bakemonogatari, and, of course, the recently completed Dance in the Vampire Bund that I’m blogging.
This guy was an old-school fan, tracking his works all the way back to the 80s. And he did manage to show us a certain continuity of Shinbo’s style throughout his shows. And there were several clips of Bakemonogatari as well, which is always welcome. But the problem was that it was too evident that he was not film or art expert – a fact he admitted a couple times in the talk. He did little to show how Shinbo’s distinct artistic style contributed to his works further than being “interesting” (a word he used too much). He and I also seem to be fans of Shinbo in completely different ways, as I like the latter half of Dance in the Vampire Bund, whereas he thinks it went downhill after the first half. So a mixed bag.
I also went to a panel on yuri, which was not safe for this blog. I did get to see some awesome scenes from the Utena movie. I never had any interest in Utena before, but after seeing some of the downright psychedelic scenes from that, I might have to seek it out.
Besides that, I ended up waiting in line for the Video Game Orchestra once again, and I was rather disappointed. I figured that they would play some of the same pieces from last week, but they literally played ONLY the pieces from last week. Not worth the 1.5 hours in line I waited for that.
I’ll be attending tomorrow as well, when even more cosplayers should come out. And more interesting panels, including one on hentai manga by Alex Leavitt.
Quite a lot are cute/ moe, quite a few pretty, a handful pretty hot, a few DANGITAMAZINGHOWDIDYOUDOTHAT and a lot of them really well-drawn. There are shitloads of KIRA! parodies
