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May 2005 - Author's Notes - 2005 With four anime conventions in North America on the Memorial Day weekend, this site had to choose which ones to attend. Getting to all four was possible, but two made more sense, especially since Fanime Con planned to hold its costume contest on Sunday. So we booked a two-convention series of flights. We made the mistake of counting the miles on the itinerary: 5,502 air miles over four days and six flights, nearly 15 hours on airplanes over a 72-hour trip. The alternatives were to stay home, drive or walk. The Animazement experience was pleasant, the Fanime Con experience adequate. The Animazement leg of this trip went smoothly. The closest thing to a hitch was a delay in getting a ride to the Raleigh-Durham airport from the Sheraton Imperial because no shuttle drivers were available; the hotel paid for the substitute cab ride. Even though carpetbaggers have taken over the Research Triangle, the convention was run in a laid-back Carolina style. To understand why, you needed to stroll the parking lot and look at the license plates; nearly all were from North Carolina, with a handful from South Carolina. That's a hint that the Carolinas have developed their own unique anime convention fan base that's separate from the Virginia fan base that dominated when Animazement began in 1998. This writer gets involved with schedules because of the time spent on airline itineraries, where you're late if you're on time. Animazement was the most punctual and efficient event of the season, with most events starting on time. That happened because the convention staff made sure events ended on time, giving enough space to reset a room for the next panel. The worst offender to the schedule was the costume contest, held up for an hour because the main ballroom was cleared after the Evangelion "musical" parody. Fans loved the zany action, especially the bearded male Rei Ayanami who was drugged everytime he tried to belt out a Broadway show tune. You needed to be very familiar with the Evangelion plot line to get the inside jokes, but the audience understood everything - and the attendance for that musical was pretty much the same as for the costume contest. A judo demonstration also got a large and appreciative audience. For fans of female Japanese voice actors, Animazement had to be heaven. The four-actor delegation that attended the convention was the largest in recent years at any North American anime convention. Aya Hisakawa, the one who got away in 2004, was on hand in 2005. It was fascinating to watch this distinguished woman and realize that she has a role in the extreme, offbeat Tenjo Tenge series, but that's why they call it acting. And it was interesting to learn that Keiko Han is a bartender and astrologer when she's not trying to talk to cats. Kyle Hebert was the lone representative of the sometimes-large Texas dub acting delegation, carrying his weight with a revised version of the anime dubbing demonstration he presented with Funimation's Justin Cook at Ushicon. Hebert's goal is to move his career to Los Angeles to take advantage of the acting opportunities there, and he was enthusiastic about a West Coast trip where he got to show his stuff for some of the top dub directors. The California voice acting community is a tough one to crack, because producers expect instant results from their performers. Also, Scott Houle and Pamela Weidner finally were married and are still looking for more dub projects to handle, looking to Florida possibilities in the coming months. One of the few major events we missed over two days in North Carolina was a meeting of the two major voices of Skuld from Oh My Goddess, Weidner and Hisakawa. Check through the Animazement costume pictures from 2005, and you'll find images of two young women in elaborate court dresses that took six weeks to make. The women arrived at the convention to find they were too late to enter the Saturday night costume contest, so they pressed their case to the court of final appeal, the other entrants in that contest. Those fellow costumers agreed to let the young women in, and their gowns were so impressive that they won two awards. So the decision by the other entrants meant they were giving up awards that would have gone to others by allowing the other two in the contest. The last-minute entrants profusely thanked the staff and entrants for letting them in, praising it as "democracy in action." Fanime Con had few guests at all. Actor Maria Yamamoto was the main guest of interest, and she had to head back to Japan after Friday and Saturday appearances (as did some of the Animazement guests, we were told). After watching much of the final laps of the Indianapolis 500, we jumped into the middle of Fanime Con and started getting costuming pictures. The plaza in front of the San Jose convention center was the costuming headquarters for the weekend, and cosplayers had to brave what we'll call "anime wind." Recall all of those melodramatic anime scenes where a long-haired character stares meaningfully into the middle distance, their hair blowing in a wind that conveniently came up? San Jose had that kindof wind on Sunday afternoon, which made for some dramatic wind effects. It also blew the water out of the center's fountain and onto costumers; an Urd and Belldandy pair from Oh My Goddess ran squealing when they got splashed by a powerful gust. During a mid-afternoon swing through the Fanime Con dealers' room, we saw a couple of guys wheeling boxes out on carts. We heard that those men were part of a dealer who had been disinvited from the dealers' room in San Jose, the second time during the weekend that had happened. There was a large area near the back of the room that had been filled with chairs on Sunday afternoon, and we understand that represented a large dealer that had been removed earlier in the weekend. The reasons, we were told, were selling bootleg materials and weapons to minors, both of which were said to have been violations of the contracts between the dealers and Fanime Con. The convention chair noted what had happened in a statement that appeared in the event newsletter. "We've had to be serious about enforcing our policies this weekend," the statement read. "Unfortunately, a very small number of dealers and members have left us no chaice but to revoke their con privileges." Of the two problems, the weapons sales probably were the most serious, because sales to minors of items even such as a bokken practice sword could be treated as a prosecutable offense under the California penal code. Bootlegs can hurt a convention's standing in the eyes of the anime industry, but weapons sales to minors can get you arrested, as we understand. One disorganization disappointment came when the Sunday night costume contest ran late. Unfortunately, the costume contest staff made it sound as if any delays were the fault of the audeince not moving quickly enough into their seats, when the problem came when the house wasn't opened until after the announced 7 p.m. Sunday starting time. This writer was fascinated by the contest's venue, the San Jose Civic Auditorium. It's one of the few major buildings in town from the 1930's, a place that was San Jose's leading location for indoor sports. We were told there's still a basketball court under the temporary floor on which seats were arranged for the contest, and there's a basketball scoreboard near the ceiling. The place looks a bit like the location of Anime Boston's contest, with most of the crowd sitting in the balcony, but the San Jose building has a pleasantly old-fashioned proscenium-arch stage about 50-60 feet wide. The old building stands out in contrast to the built-just-ten-minutes-ago look of the rest of Silicon Valley's undeclared capitol city. Then there was the Sunday night incident that kept us from getting pictures of the costume contest winners, something we've done with only a handful of exceptions since 1998. We'd left the theater for a couple of minutes in a rushed attempt to transfer some image files and chase down the card wallet we lost (many thanks to the civic auditorium staff for finding the wallet and its memory cards), and noticed that the USAMusume fan group had started a performance. we grabbed our equipment. rushed back into the hall and started taking pictures, when a convention staffer emphaticaly told us there would be no more picture taking in the hall. He didn't know why, so we were told to go to the convention operations officer - where someone on a two-way radio said either "the stage," someone named "John" or the "performers" didn't want their pictures taken. A few minutes later we bumped into USAMusume and asked if they had ordered a photo ban on their performance, and they said no - but someone on the costume contest staff may have ordered that. Because of the confusion, we felt it was best to stay away from the hall for the rest of the evening, figuring Fanime Con staff also would object to getting images of the costume contest winners. During a previous Memorial Day weekend, this site made a brief stop at Anime North in Toronto, where the guests of honor included the husband and wife acting and dub production team of Jaxon Lee and Amanda Winn Lee. After appearing at Ohayocon in 2004, the Lees dropped off the convention circuit (except for a brief Anime Expo) appearance when Amanda became pregnant. Nicholas Lee was born in November of 2004. In mid-May, Amanda Lee let fans known - and the word quickly spread - that Nicholas had been diagnosed with leukemia. Chemotherapy immediately followed, and in late May the treatments appeared to have been working. The hopes and prayers of the Lees' many friends from years of conventions, compounded by medical science, seemed to be working. There's no reason to muse about the fairness or unfairness of life; we'll just hope that life goes on, the Lord willing. May 2005 Main Page