Convention Schedule Previous Reports Personality of the Week About this Site Search this Site Racing and More E-Mail the Author

Anime Expo - Author's Notes - 2006 Like many of the hotels and motels near Disneyland, the Anaheim Hilton and Towers, home to many Anime Expo events, has a store selling Disney merchandise. Look at the front of the store, the place where the best-selling and best-promoted merchandise is located, and you would have found a display of Mikcey and Minnie Mouse dolls, right next to a pink display of Hello Kitty material. That wasn't the only place where the heart of the Disney and the queen of Japanese cuteness were located cheek-to-jowl. At the Los Angeles International Airport, a gift kiosk had Disney Princess souvenirs right next to Hello Kitty merchandise. We spotted something that would appeal only to film buffs, but we thought it was fascinating. Anime Expo is among the few conventions that display some shows through film, not video projectors,and we got a close look at their projectors between shows. They're old Century 35mm projectors, updated by replacing the old carbon arc lamps with zenon bulbs and replacing the optical sound gates with Dolby magnetic heads. Despite the updates, the projectors are basically the same units that probably were used sixty years ago, before color film, and it's not hard to imagine the images of James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson being displayed through those same units. It's the equivalent of entering a Studebaker Dictator in the Daytona 500 and winning the race. Anime Expo claimed 41,000 fans attedned the four-day event, and as before, it's hard to imagine where all the people went because nothing seemed crowded during the weekend. The answer probably was that the Anaheim convention center has so much space that thousands could easily disappear inside the dealers' room and never be noticed on the outside. That "room" used one and a half of the convention center's main halls, set up with 30-foot spaces between vendors tables; we've been to conventions where the entire dealers' room wasn't 30 feet wide. Each day, so many fans lined up early for the 10 a.m. opening that the line wound outside the convention center's main concourse and wrapped back upon itself. Even on Tuesday, the convention's final day and one of the rare Tuesdays to have a fandom event, had a big dealers' room crowd. We heard some gumbling among some of the vendors that they didn't get the up-front hall spots they expected to get. We also found that some of the vendors planned to head to both Comic-Com International in three weeks, and then one month later to the Gen Con Game Fair in Indianapolis; both events seem to be taking on a greater anime emphasis as the business appears to grow. While most of those in the U.S. industry said business was running strong and their man concern was finding new ways to stay competitive, a few said that times had gotten tougher, that the bankruptcy of Musicland Stores had sapped some com[panies of important cash flow, and corporate moves billed as investments and mergers actually were buyouts where one company rescued another business that was about to go broke. You couldn't have told anthing was wrong by looking at the dealers' room, though. Nor would you have gotten any idea of anything wrong with the California tourist economy. One sign that things are good was the presence of a grader in a previously vacant, now walled-off half-acre of land between the Marriott hotel and the convention center, scraping dirt to prepare for construction. A half-block to the east on Convention Way, another lot had been reduced to dirt and construction was well underway. As always, the concourse between the Hilton and the convention center was a costuming headquarters for the four days of the convention, with a notable exception. Part of the area was turned into a food court, but no one complained and costumers just moved to one side. Outdoor costuming was uncomfortable in the 90-degree heat that began the weekend, but no one seemd to have been discouraged. The same type of cosplay groups that had gathered in previous Anaheim years were back in 2006, with the exception of a big Bleach group that wouldn't fit anywhere in the area. So the costumers, who at first thought they were going to gather on the center's top floor, trudged to the south end of the convention center where they filled a staircase that was nearly 100 feet wide. It's going to take some work to find a comparable space when Anime Expo returns in 2007. The convention apparently couldn't get the dates they wanted in Anaheim, so they'll move back to the Long Beach convention center from June 29-July 2 of next year. The Long Beach facility has a theater which is better than anything available in Anaheim, but the Long Beach facility is smaller than the Anaheim center (most convention centers in the U.S. are smaller), so it could be tougher to find the open spaces that fans enjoyed in 2006. This site posted fewer pictures in 2006 than in 2005, because we concentrated more on interview sessions with the artistic guests of honor than on costuming pictures. We got to all of those sessions except the one with Fullmetal Alchemist director Seiji Mizushima, because it was scheduled at the same time as the Clamp interview session. Fortunately, we'd already had a chance to hear Mizushima at Otakon in 2005. Where you see blank spots on the pages is where Anime Expo said the guests of honor didn't want to be photographed. We thought that made sense because some of the guests were shyer than others...until an person who was supposed to be an Anime Expo staff photographer walked into an interview session and took pictures of a guest that we weren't supposed to photograph. That wasn't explained and still doesn't make any sense. Pictures Panels and Interviews Anime Expo Main Page