| This is the comeback year for Mari Iijima. For years, the original
Japanese-language acting and singing voice of Lyn Minmay in Macross has
been living in Los Angeles with her American husband, raising her two children
and continuing to release albums in Japan. Now, Iijima has no Japanese
album contract and is still trying to crack into the U.S. record market.
She hadn't been involved in American anime fandom until 1999, when she
started touring anime conventions. FanimeCon in March was her first appearance,
followed by A-Kon 10. |
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| Why did Iijima decide to make the rounds of fandom? Part of the reason
was what she found on the World-Wide Web. When Iijima checked search engines
with her name, she was pleasantly surprised to find there were many fan
sites dedicated to her and others who remembered her work in Macross. To
meet those fans, and to help promote an English-language album she will
release in the U.S. this summer, Iijima decided to go on the road in America. |
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| Iijima sounds as if she has mixed feelings about the Minmay role. "I
haven't done any animation jobs since Lyn Minmay and I'm proud of that,"
she said at her Saturday A-Kon panel. "I struggled with this image. Lyn
Minmay was such a big thing and I wanted to go forward in my music career.
I may have talked negatively about animation. Maybe people took me too
seriously and I talked too much." Some of that criticism was aimed at the
Americanized Robotech series, where "The music was a little...sorry, maybe
they weren't as serious as us on the music part." |
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| Iijima wants to be known as a musician, not just a voice from an old
series. "People don't know that I can produce a record. They think I'm
still Minmay - even in Japan." Most of her previous albums, and her upcoming
summer release, have songs that she has written, both tunes (she's a classically-trained
pianist) and lyrics. "I didn't want a stranger to write my lyrics. I wanted
to write them for myself," she said about the English-language lyrics she
created for her new album. Can Iijima succeed with charm and grace in an
American music market where anger, angst and nihilism often rule the charts? |
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