Fireworks hold a timeless fascination, and conventions offer that same sense of wonder and amazement. And the conventions have the same sort of spirit as old-fashioned county fairs. There might not seem to be much resemblance between cotton candy on the fairgrounds midway and Pocky at a convention, but look closer and you see the comparison. The author watched the Sunday morning parade of costumers, and his thoughts went back to the Farmers' Day parade at the state fair. Anime conventions are that much an American original, even though they celebrate an Asian art form (but an art with a lot of American influence). 

This marked the author's fourth trip to Anime Expo. In 1998, the author was amazed by the huge convention and its 4,500 fans. In 2001, there will be at least two other conventions that exceed that total, last month's Project: A-Kon (with around 5,200 people) and next month's Otakon (which probably will leap past their 2000 attendance of 7,500). And Anime Expo had around 12,000 fans over four days, roughly ten times their attendance at the inaugural event in 1991. So small anime conventions keep growing into big events, and fans keep starting new small conventions that are likely to grow. If people really want conventions to remain small, they'll stay home - but that doesn't seem likely. 

Nor will the number of conventions decrease. The announcement that drew a lot of attention at Anime Expo came at the opening ceremonies (which were missed by the author: he was in mid-air over Nevada). There had been hints that the Society for the Promotion of Japanese Animation was going to add an event on the Labor Day weekend in 2002; the surprise came when the society announced that the event was not going to be in California, but in New York City. The timing was interesting, coming a few months after another organization announced another anime convention scheduled for late October of 2001 in New York, and not long after Hobbystar of Canada announced a combined anime - sci-fi - comics convention for Boston in October. Was the SPJA trying to expand into new territory or protect its turf against competition? And can anyone promote an affordable anime convention in a major city, considering the increased costs of staging Otakon in Baltimore and the high prices expected for the Big Apple Anime convention? Can the vendors who populate a dealers' room hold up under the regulations of major convention halls in New York? These are the obstacles that Anime Expo's organizers face in staging the New York event.

Fans are going to want to know if Anime Expo got too big in 2001. Well, maybe. The organization that was great for 4,000 people has more trouble handling nearly three times that number. Spreading out the convention events over three widely-separated buildings kept the fans thinned out, so the event never had a crowded feeling. All indications were that functions such as registration went well, but there were enough organizational hitches that left you scratching your head (like the many unhappy costumers who complained that the music they selected for their masquerade acts was not played.)

Anime Expo will need to work out those bugs and have a rock-solid organization in place for their move into the New York area. New Yorkers aren't known for their patience or tolerance of the things that go wrong at anime conventions..

If you want to know why the author keeps going to the time and expense of attending anime conventions, one story provides an answer. It was Thursday night after two costuming panels, and the author was trying to get the web site updated. His attempts to use a wireless cell phone link didn't work, and the author was trying to get back to his room to start a belated upload...but every step saw another friend directly ahead in the halls, another welcome greeting and more talk about how the convention had gone so far and how the author's trip to California had been (extremely smooth, thank you, although the cab ride from the airport to the hotel wasn't cheap). There was a pair of costumers from Nevada, another pair from Idaho, friends from Michigan, a California group, and the Digital Manga assembly had the Utena voice actor in tow - and insisted that the author attend the panel where the actor would appear. 

The hardest part of making these convention reports is expressing the enjoyment and camaraderie that comes from meeting people who are dedicated to this special form of fandom. Sure, things so wrong, but there's no huge griping and complaining seen by this author. And any trouble is always overwhelmed by the pleasant experience of meeting old and new friends at these events. That half-hour bouncing from conversation to conversation in the hotel lobby on Thursday night showed how many friends can be made at these conventions - and emphasized what the author keeps going back to the events, time and time again. 

Although...before he left for Anime Expo in 2001, the author glanced at his reports from the 2000 event and wondered if he could do that all over again. Well, he couldn't. This site took a big step forward in posting large numbers of costuming pictures, and fell back in posting reports on panel discussions and stories from interview session. And what sort of excuse does the author have for going through the weekend without any material on one of the convention's biggest stars, Yu Watase?

Uh...the author was probably too busy chasing costumes. Plus, he was compelled to fulfill a forgotten promise to appeal on a photography panel that happened to be at the same time as Watase's interview session. Lame excuse, isn't it? The author also wants to use an excuse of having trouble with the hotel's phone system. 

But when the author mentioned that situation to friends - saying that he set a record for most costuming pictures and fewest interview and panel stories from Anime Expo - the friends replied, "That's what people want." The site's statistics bear that out. And another event also proved the point. Anime Expo decided to have a display of costumes at a "fashion show" on Sunday morning. the convention set up a stage and double-winged runway set in the rear of the hall used for the dealers' room and waited for fans to arrive. Toting cameras of every description, the fans thundered into the event in numbers so strong that the runway set was overstuffed. And there were twice as many costume entries for the fashion shows than for the masquerade (which was limited to 50 entries). That fashion show was a dramatic example of the attraction of anime convention cosplay.

The author accomplished one selfish goal on this trip. Outside the convention center, he found a series of red and white blocks painted on the street, covered with black marks. That was the remains of the apex of the turn leading to the back stretch of the Long Beach Grand Prix race course. Anime Expo was located in the middle of a race track - in the city streets used each April by the Long Beach Grand Prix, CART's biggest event. One other anime convention this year was next door to a race track - Anime Central, located next to the Arlington International Racecourse used by horses.

The author really had wanted to go to one of the inaugural anime conventions that were held three weeks earlier - Mikkakan or Anime Mid-Atlantic - but the budget wouldn't have held up. The four days of Anime Expo are a great experience, but the hotel and airline used by the author have to be paid for their services. Hitchhiking and carrying a tent weren't usable options this time.

While the "censorship" incident got a lot of attention at the exhibit hall in 2000, few people noticed another change in the 2001 dealers' list. Anime Depot was gone. The Virginia company had jumped into anime video sales with a big splash in 1999, then slammed into a major financial wall of too many expenses and not enough sales. Months before Anime Expo in 2001, Anime Depot was out of business, selling the last of its tapes and moving what was left of the company to California. But while Anime Depot was gone, there was a fresh supply of dealers for fans to visit at Anime Expo.

And after the convention was over, it developed that Anime Expo officials had invited U.S. Customs agents to sweep the exhibit hall for counterfeits and bootlegs. That followed the removal of a dealer from the Project: A-Kon dealers' room for bootlegs, and was in line with the 1999 efforts to of Nintendo of America to seize Pokemon bootlegs. This action was one of the most significant one of the weekend, but it got little attention. The biggest online talk this time was the discussion of an obscenity on the shopping bags given out by an exhibit hall vendor - and that was nothing close to the "censorship" talk from the previous year.

The convention continued as a springboard for product promotion. The most imaginative publicity item in 2001 may have been the Broccoli and Digital Manga auditions for the English-language voice of Dejiko from DiGi Charat for TV commercials. And Studio Pierrot officials listened intently to fan reaction to title sequences of their shows.

Anime Expo came a few weeks after the release of Atlantis by the Walt Disney Co. Some anime fans delighted in finding the similarities between Atlantis and Nadia and the Secret of Blue Water, but fewer seemed to note that there were as many similarities between the Nadia series and a little film known as Laputa by some guy named Miyazaki.

To the author, it was more interesting to read the mainstream reviews of Atlantis and see how many of those reviewers declared that the Disney film wasn't to their liking because it wasn't a musical comedy. Those reviews seemed to come perilously close to stating that Atlantis was too adult for an American movie audience that expects animation to be aimed at juveniles. Those reviews showed the difficulty that anime has in making a larger breakout; many people aren't ready for the art form's unique challenges for its audience. Too many people still can't escape from the prejudice that "animation" equals "children."

But the box office might have a different message. The animated Shrek, not considered to be an important film when it was released in May, turned out to be the biggest money-maker of the spring and early summer, with a $200 million gross that outdistanced even the hyped Pearl Harbor.

Shrek had some of the uninhibited irreverence of anime, but it was animated by computer, not with ink and paint. That created some speculation that the larger American movie audience was fascinated by computer animation - and led to even more anticipation toward the release of the computer-animated Final Fantasy film. And it just so happened that there were dozens of Final Fantasy costumers on hand.

This convention's sad note comes about a couple of veteran fans,  Doc and Amy, whose cute daughter was named an anime personality convention of the week on this site. In early July, there was a fire in the apartment complex where they lived. All three got out okay, but they lost many of their possessions to smoke and water damage.