Anime Boston 2007 Convention Report

Silent Hill cosplayers, and Death at Dunkin Donuts.

Anime Boston 2007 went down last weekend and I attended. I really like mid-sized conventions like AB, which is turning into an awesome con. It tends to have good cosplay, excellent guests (Junji Nishimura and Yasuhiro Imagawa), a handful of good panels, an adequate dealers room and an artist’s alley of significant size and quality. The Masquerade, which I did not attend, had pre-screening for skits, which is always a step in the right direction. Former con chair Patrick D attempted to destroy a Tuxedo Mask doll at his Chibi Project panel.

It is such a fine line between a good convention and a bad convention. Anime Boston’s downtown location has the advantage of being near a lot of food, including a Trader Joe’s across the street. They also print maps to food and restaurant hours and numbers in the back of the convention booklet - genius! Food within walking distance can make all the difference. Instead of putting the schedule in the con book, it was available on a separate flyer although with some articles, called “Con Chowder”, and a new issue of Con Chowder is printed each day and made available throughout the convention center. Con Chowder also prints the dealer’s room hours and other vital con scheduling all on one page. Attention New York Comic Con organizers: Please emulate Anime Boston!

I got to meet other comic bloggers, Brigid from mangablog.net, who introduced me to Robin from No Flying No Tights. Brigid also interviewed my new friends from the Artists Alley, Dave Roman and Raina Telgemeier. I got to meet Rosemary Mosco who flew down from Toronto, and I hung out with the cool people behind Life Meter Comics. I even got to meet Rangiku of the Anime Pulse Podcast. She recorded some panels, so check their site in the next few days.

Only two new anime licenses were announced - The Familiar of Zero from Geneon and Innocent Venus from ADV. The industry panels had other interesting news, though, which I have summarized below:

Funimation:

• One Piece will start getting an uncut released in 13 episode boxed sets starting late this year or in 2008
• Tsubasa: RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE is coming out in May and will be promoted in Gaia online
• Mokona hats will be convention-exclusive
• Beck DVDs are coming in July
• Afro Samurai is coming to DVD next month in cut and uncut versions

Geneon:

• New Licenses: The Familiar of Zero
• Thin packs will be available of: Doki Doki School Hours; I, My, Me - Strawberry Eggs; Ikkitousen Complete Collection; Tenchi Muyo! Movie Collection; Tenchi Universe Complete Collection; Tenchi in Tokyo Complete Collection; Tetsujin 28 Complete Box; and the Vandread Complete Collection.
• Geneon is re-releasing: 3×3 Eyes, Legend of the Dog Warriors, and El Hazard: The Magnificent World
• Upcoming DVDs: Karin (Chibi Vampire), Rozen Maiden, Ayakashi: Samurai Horror, Black Lagoon (I need to watch this one), and When They Cry (which sounds interesting)
• The Hellsing OAV volume 2 comes out on June 12th

Bandai:

• Upcoming DVDs: Gunbuster 2, Demon Prince Enma, Wings of Rean, Freedom (the first anime DVD in HD!).
• Wings of Honneamise will get an HD release, but there is no release date yet
• Panelist Takenari Maeda, the vice-presiden of Bandai Visual USA surveyed the audience about what kind of extras they like with the DVDs.
• Con attendees expressed their concern about Bandai’s high price points. Maeda responded that the DVDs are priced closer to Japanese DVDs because they hope to drop the region encoding someday and don’t want to risk reverse-importation.

ADV:

• Innocent Venus has been licensed
• Anime News Network has posted a video of the panel’s Q&A session
• It’s worth noting that the ADV panelist, the outspoken David Williams, always goes to Anime Boston. Perhaps this is why ADV had two panel times and screened three whole episodes of their new anime: 009-1, Ah! My Goddess TV (a second season episode), and Innocent Venus.

For more news coverage of Anime Boston 2007, I recommend checking out Anime New Networks’s coverage, Anime Boston’s official convention blog and this coverage on the Tokyopop site.

The AMV contest this year was not as good as last year, but there were a couple of good videos in the batch. You can see the complete list of competitors and winners over at the animemusicvideos.org forum. There were only three videos that really caught my attention.

“Ganseki No Kobushi (A Rock Lee profile)” by Songbird21 set Naruto footage to the song “Rawk Fist” by Thousand Foot Krutch. It took the award for Best Editing. I had never heard this song before, but thanks this AMV I will never be able to think of anything other than Rock Lee when I hear it. The lyric, “That’’s the sound when the rock hits!” can just be interpreted so many ways!

AMV editor Borihiei took Best Comedy and Best in Show with his two entries in the contest “No Reason” and “Something Wicked This Way Comes”. “No Reason” featured a Mooninite (from Aqua Teen Hunger Force) conducting the 1812 Overture to scenes of destruction from a variety of anime sources. It was an excellent send-up of Moonnites in the news in Boston, and there was at least one cosplayer who also did a send-up of the incident:

“Something Wicked This Way Comes” paired footage from My Neighbor Totoro with the song “Reqiuem for a Tower”, an instrumental that you might remember from the movie Requiem for a Dream, and it has been used in other movie trailers, most notably a trailer for Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers movie. Borihiei’s video re-imagines Totoro as a horror film, complete with an alternate ending.

I should mention at this point that AMVs (Anime Music Videos) are illegal art. Although many anime conventions obtain the performance rights for the music to show the videos in their contests, these videos are made without permission from the source material’s copyright holders. Nevertheless, I am a big fan of AMVs. I don’t read fanfic, but I do enjoy a good AMV contest.

The defining moment of Anime Boston 2007 was watching people dance to the Haruhi Suzumiya end credit song in the dealer’s room, where one dealer had set up a video continually playing the animation on a loop. Several con-goers, including me, took videos of young Americans practicing the dance, although one guy caught the Crayon Shin-Chan promoter also doing the dance.

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya was huge in Japan last year and dominated the winter Comic Market (Comiket). The DVDs will hit American shelves May 29th, courtesy of Bandai. One video of otaku in the streets of Akihabara doing the dance in a massive organized group has been making the rounds on Youtube. I don’t know if the American fans practicing the dance are purposefully emulating their Tokyo counterparts or if the dance is just really fun.