Articles
Report: Anime Evolution 2004 part 1 - 6/9/04
By: Jesse Betteridge
Thursday/Friday
Anime Evolution 2004 at Simon Fraser University began with one noticable improvement over last year: those who registered early were actually able to pick up their con badges on Thursday night. As you may recall hearing me mention before (or perhaps even experiencing yourself), standing in line for registration took nearly eight hours last year and was far from my highlight of the weekend. While Thursday night wasn't exactly an extravagant event, the procedure was quite speedy. Last year all of the work was done across three computers; this year, all of the work was done across no computers. I guess technology really is the problem sometimes.
In about fifteen minutes I received my con badge, which had my name cut off, and a bag that was allegedly filled with goodies. But obviously I had been had because all I found in the bag was a program guide and a small Dark Horse promotional poster. Not even the schedules were ready to hand out that night, not to mention that the bags had this bland, yellow-blackish scheme and were rather small and flimsy. That wasn't a huge problem of course, but they were quite dissapointing compared to the big bags that were given out last year when Bandai had a more active roll in running the con.
I arrived around 9:30am the next morning. The first thing I noticed was the arrivals from that morning cheerfully glancing at schedules and two or three promotional manga booklets inside their con bags. Not that I was all that interested in the titles being sampled, of course, but this upset me quite a bit on principle. But at least the queue that morning was a lot longer than the queue from the night before, so I'll just call it even.
The opening ceremonies started about half an hour late, but I wasn't very dissapointed because the 404s, a comedy group who specializes in Anime improv, kept the crowd under control with their random dialogue and a capella rendition of the Mazinger Z theme song. It's also during this time that I ran into kaiser from Anime Source, which I should've suspected immediately based on the way he was trying to read the cut off name on my ID tag like some kind of weirdo. Shortly after, a group of taeko drummers performed for about half an hour, but with the sun beating down I decided to head inside the school and take a look at how everything was moving along.
Things weren't nearly as out of control as they were last year, but it took a few hours for the con to really get in gear. After grabbing some tenpyaki noodles for lunch in the food court outside, I went upstairs to see if the Dealer's Room had opened up yet. It wasn't scheduled to open until 2:00, but peering through the windows, I could clearly see that the sellers had a lot more swag this time around. The only problem was that the line was absolutely enormous. It had been building up pretty much since the con had started, and even after the doors had opened people spent as much as two hours waiting in line. I came back again at about 5:30pm when the line had diminished to about a quarter of its original size. Although I still had to wait for about forty minutes to get in.
I poked around for a little while. I was really excited that C&L had come to the con to sell DVDs, but was really dissapointed to see that regardless of their large selection, everything was significantly more expensive than on their website, and the prices never went down either. I guess they're going to need a little competition next year. When I came out I noticed that the line was completely gone. And it never came back again that weekend.
Oh yeah, on that day I did pick up one neat little item: a plushy of Ed and Ein from Cowboy Bebop! I found it buried underneath a bunch of other plushies, and it appeared to be the only one they had. It cost me $25, but I can confidently say that it was the best purchase I made at the con.
There were a total of six video rooms set up, two of which ran for 24 hours. The funny thing is that last year many of the rooms actually showed fansubs of recent shows. However, since AE is trying to be taken a little more seriously this year, that was done away with and all of the rooms showed only licensed shows that had been released on DVD. However, since the most recent licensed shows to be released just happen to be most of the programs that were being showed last year, so the viewing options were pretty much the same as they were last year so I didn't spend a lot of time in the video rooms during the day. The only thing I actually watched from beginning to end on Friday was Interstella 5555, which was marvellous.
Having enjoyed what was essentially an advertisement for their show before the opening ceremonies, I went to the 404's Anime Improv show. They played a lot of the usual improvisation games like "Scenes from a Hat" and "Scene Change". The most entertaining one, however, was one in which they called members of the audience up to tell a fairy tale using funny impersonations, and one particular audience member pretty much outdid the professionals with his impression of Shaggy from Scooby Doo.
The only scheduled panel that night was for the young voice actors Alexandra Carter and Andrew Francis. However, that panel was delayed at the last minute and was scheduled to include Nicole Leroux at the last minute. Unfortunately, I lost track of time and didn't manage to get to that panel. Apart from that, the big event for the evening was the screening of Satoshi Kon's Millennium Actress. I didn't stick around, since I had already seen the movie, but I did catch the North American premiere for the Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence trailer that preceded it. Let me just say that Batou is the man.
Since University policy dictates that minors must skidaddle at 12:00am, I did so after grabbing some more noodles for dinner.