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marked the return of this site's author to the practice of selling
pictures to cosplayers and cosplay books to anyone. It was this
writer's hope to be able to spend the slow times during his two-day
convention weekend away from his table and at a couple of interesting
panel discussions. There were a couple of slow points on Friday, but
the traffic never slowed on Saturday, from the 9:30 a.m. setup time to
a run downstairs for the futile attempt to get pictures of the costume
contest. And even when that fell through because of the organizers'
infatuation with darkness, the author found more customers back at the
table who were waiting for him. So the Saturday night situation was a
blessing in disguise, as was the entire weekend. The people who run the convention actually wanted the author on hand and were kind enough to defray a portion of his travel expenses, enough to cover the cost of the early Sunday morning ride to LaGuardia Airport. On top of that, AnimeNEXT set up the author with a great location on the hotel's second floor, one level above the main concourse. Often a second-floor location is off the beaten path, but this time it was an ideal location. Like Times Square on the other side of the Hudson River, everyone at the convention eventually went upstairs and passed the author's cubbyhole. There was more than enough traffic and plenty of space; the foot traffic ran around the corner to the artists' alley, which was crowded for the entire weekend. A downstairs weekend would have been too much in the way, especially on the convention's Saturday when the place was exceptionally packed. Three New York-area conventions from 2003 - the specialty Yuri Con and Shoujocon, along with the mass-appeal Big Apple Anime Fest - disappeared in 2004, leaving AnimeNEXT as the only big convention between Boston and Baltimore. With no other convention in the New York area, fans from the other three events descended on Secaucus on Saturday, resulting in registration lines that wound out of the lobby. It was an organization headache that still was a vote of confidence of sorts for AnimeNEXT in its third year. Odd item of the weekend #1: the author wandered into the Crowne Plaza's restaurant during the closing minutes of their Friday night dinner buffet, and loaded a plate just in time to spot Viz Video's Toshi Yoshida and Trish Ledoux, along with their newborn son and actor Richard Cox. The author paused to chat with the group, and was finishing his chicken when he saw an odd commotion at the other end of the restaurant. It looked as if a young woman was being helped of the floor, then being bodily carried across the restaurant. It took the author a moment to realize that the person being carted across the floor was actor Lauren Goodnight, who had lost an argument with the partially-obscured steps to the restaurant's lower level and twisted an ankle. The mishap didn't slow Goodnight much, because she returned for a female voice actors' panel on Saturday afternoon with Kelli Shayne Butler (who searched out the author's picture table on Saturday), Lisa Ortiz and Veronica Taylor. Odd item of the weekend #2: Yoshida was spotted on the convention's main floor at 10 a.m. Saturday, an unusually early time for the party guy turned father. Yoshida said he was up early for a Ranma 1/2 fan gathering, and added that his newborn son's early waking habits made it easier for him to wake early for the convention event...but he said he wasn't going to stay awake any longer than necessary. Yoshida is a lot thinner now, by the way. Odd item of the weekend #3: the author left The Spunks concert on Friday night before it was over, only to miss the highlight of the night; even with convention security types at the front of the stage, watching the crowd, strange things came from the stage, where the lead singer supposedly leapt from the stage and did some hands-on crowd surfing. Odd item of the weekend #4: fans insisted on feeding the Fan's View guy. One person kept up a habit of bringing Krispy Kreme donuts, just the right thing for reducing the author's size-54 waistline (the donuts disappeared faster than Vash the Stampede could make them go away). Another fan brought apples that lasted less time than the donuts. When that second fan offered to bring oranges, the hungry author warned him that he would devour them without peeling them first. So here came the oranges, and down the gullet they went in ten bites each. The most imaginative costume of the weekend was a re-interpretation of Nicholas D. Wolfwood, the itinerant preacher from Trigun who carries a large cross. Consider the large Jewish population in the New York area, combine that with the fact that much of the convention was held on the Sabbath, and the result was Wolfwood as a rabbi, wearing a yarmulke and carrying a six-pointed Star of David in place of a cross. Fans were praising the "Jewish Wolfwood" all day Saturday. The weekend's largest irrational ego-boost came on Saturday. A friend who is a frequent convention goer told the author that he had gone to AnimeNEXT because he had seen the Friday pictures and stories on this site, realized the convention was within driving distance and decided to go to the event. That friend said he had a deja vu moment when he strolled to the hotel's second floor, found this site's photo area, and recognized the corner used for the cosplay pictures from the images he already had seen on the site from the previous day. Anime conventions aren't the only entertainment events around, and even the largest convention faces some competition. The author of this site went to state fairs long before conventions existed and likes those shows, which are older than the nation. But he didn't expect to find a state fair across the road from AnimeNEXT. There it was, in the parking lot of Giants Stadium, the Bennigan's State Fair Meadowlands. It even had its own kind of cosplay, where spectators were encouraged to "...take a photo with your favorite costumed character." Wonder where we've seen that before? If you've seen the closing credits animation of Inu-Yasha with the illuminated Ferris wheel, the Meadowlands state fair looked exactly the same from the Crowne Plaza at night. The author enjoyed that view on Saturday night after the work was over, thought about it, reached for the camera and tried to capture the view, only to find that the lights had been extinguished and the show was over - a symbolic way of noting the end of the author's convention trip. The author's return trip, caused by his obsession with arriving as early as possible for a flight, began when he checked out of the Crowne Plaza Meadowlands and headed to the main entrance for his ride to LaGuardia. The car was scheduled to roll to the hotel at 3 a.m. Sunday, but the author was pleased to see it arrive just as the author arrived, 30 minutes early. Then it was east across Jersey to the Lincoln Tunnel, under the Hudson River and into Manhattan, which still has its worn-out semi-charm after dark. The author planned the very early trip in hopes that traffic would be manageable on the stop and go path across Manhattan, and the strategy worked for once with no construction zones. The adventure began when the author's car got to the Delta terminal at LaGuardia, headed toward the drop off and barely stopped short of orange barrels marking the ramp as closed. Before the car's driver could throw it in reverse, a taxi arrived and blocked the path, and the car's driver got out and tried to get the taxi to turn around. Then a NYPD car, red lights flashing, pulled up behind the taxi. The cop, brusque in classic New York style, demanded to know what the cab driver was thinking before sending the hack on its way. Then it was the patrolman's turn to throw his attention at the author's driver, insisting the tell what was going on. The driver could barely stammer out the first words of an explanation before the cop ordered him to get out. The rest of the run to the terminal was uneventful. Inside, things got interesting. The author thought it never was too early to get to an airport, but Sunday morning's experience changed his mind. Around the time of AnimeNEXT came the release of "The Terminal," The film, directed by Steven Spielberg, tells the story of Tom Hanks' character, a stateless man stuck in an airport terminal. LaGuardia seemed like that at three in the morning, with a scattering if people sleeping on seats, baggage racks and the floor. Downstairs, a LaGuardia employee seemed perturbed at the two men, apparently less than sober, who tried to talk themselves into an obviously closed section of the terminal. The absurdly early exit from the convention worked perfectly, as the author got to Indianapolis in plenty of time to drive to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway for the U.S. Grand Prix. He thought he was going to a race, not a cosplay event, until he wandered into a group of Ferrari fans in wild red outfits never seen at any race track. That inspired the author to create the first ever racing cosplay feature, figuring anime fans would rather see that than the usual pictures of race cars running in circles and crashing. A week and a half before AnimeNEXT, Ray Charles died in California. His half-century career touched every genre of popular music and extended around the world in ways that even touched Japanese animation. The Metropolis feature film made by the Mad House studio was a labor of love, produced by animators with an abiding respect for Osamu Tezuka. Some of the animators who led the production of that film also worked for Tezuka in the 1960's, at the same time that Charles' pop music powers were at their height. The impact of Charles' music was so deep that, when the film was made in 2001, his recording of "I Can't Stop Loving You" was used in Metropolis. When asked about the use of Charles' performance, Mad House producer Masao Maruyama, said "That's the kind of music the director Rintaro likes. We also literally meant what the lyrics meant when it said `you can't stop loving,' referring to Osamu Tezuka and Tima the character. You can also consider that it means `you can't stop loving anime.'" |
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