Articles
Report: SakuraCon 2006 part 1 - 30/04/06
By: Jesse Betteridge
Thursday/Friday
At 12am our ride was all set to drag the sorry, academically-negligent asses of myself and several other members of my school's anime club down to Seattle for SakuraCon 2006. Despite having to stop and talk with my Philosophy teaching assistant about a rather poor mark on a paper which I feared would be consuming my mind for the bulk of the trip, having to stop to grab some US cash, and taking the wrong train twice, I still managed to arrive first. But soon enough, my second ever journey to the United States had commenced, and it wouldn't be long until we were embracing the exotic world of one dollar bills, Old Country Buffet, and Hot Topic with its Fullmetal Alchemist Energy Drinks for the market savvy anti-conformist on the go. I regret not stocking up, myself.
We arrived at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center a few hours later. Despite having switched to a new, much larger venue this year, everything seemed to run quite smoothly as far as registration went on Thursday night. Except, of course, for those of us waiting for those pervasively fickle press badges. Tracking them down led me to circle around no less than three different rooms. Along with an extra press pass, we each got one of those fancy Bandai-sponsored con bags with the handles which I naturally broke in half within a few hours. There weren't really any notable goodies inside.
Jevon and Andrew precede me upon our grand entrance in our opening shot. Thea and Jing pose in the next shot with some girl I don't know dressed as Motoko Kusanagi.
Probably the best surprise waiting for us at our hotel was the promise of a free breakfast each morning. We're still not sure if we were actually supposed to get this in our package, since there was a notable lack of costumed con-goers in the hotel restaurant each morning, but we were damned if we were going to turn this offer down. It was quite a hefty buffet style breakfast at that, and we felt a bit silly for buying as much food as we did before we arrived, since lunch had basically no longer become a necessity. But perhaps the only thing better than the free food in the morning was the food we ate for dinner at the Elephant and Castle Restaurant. Best $7 I've ever spent on a burger, to the best of my knowledge anyway. We were also told we wouldn't have the window in our room which, much to our relief, proved not to be the case.
See those escalators? We became quite familiar with them at this con. Especially when they broke down for a few hours.
The next day, the sun was shining in brightly through said window, much to our surprise. The weather forecasts had led pretty much everyone to believe that impending clouds would guarantee a wet and gloomy con to christen its new location, but this most definitely proved not to be the case. The weather was gorgeous all weekend, and the trade center was a place that complimented it nicely. Since we all lost track of each other within minutes, I just headed straight to the opening ceremonies which were a pretty standard affair. Opening video to which audience members fanatically cheered at clips of their favourite shows, a short kendo presentation, the Dee Dees from Batman Beyond singing the theme to Excel Saga, a marriage proposal, and a few skits from the Alberta-based comedy group The 404's - pretty much everything I expected.
A quick Kendo presentation followed by the guest introduction. Pictured above are Jennifer Sekiguchi, Tony Oliver, Jessica Boone, David Vincent, David Williams, Bang Ippongi, and Camino.
Right off the bat, SakuraCon quickly confirmed one of my greatest fears about humanity in general: for some reason, people seem to legitimately enjoy standing in lines. This first became apparent to me before the dealer's room opened. At Anime Evolution, the line was always formed initially because there was an extremely limited capacity inside the dealer's room, but that most certainly was not the case here. The room was absolutely massive with what had to be nearly one hundred vendors scattered all across the floor showcasing the most lavish of goodies, and although the line spread across the entire perimeter of huge multi-purpose area, every single person was able to migrate into the room. The thing is, somehow, I suspect everyone standing in that line knew that pretty much everyone was going to get in. From that point onwards, the outer areas of the con were deceptively less crowded. Were one not to inspect the number people circulating the dealer's room, they would conclude that the convention only had about 1/3rd of its attendants.
Random cosplay from Friday. There SHOULD be a photo of me with Sonic the Hedgehog in here, but Karl apparently lost it. But I did get the infamous Mario and Luigi girls dressed as Sonic and Tails.
Taking a quick peek inside this massive space left little wonder as to why it established itself as the lifeblood of the con. Just entering that flood of unrestrained market lunacy just sent a surge through your spine, killing off any appreciation for self-control. But, at the same time, you couldn't help but feel a bit bad for the poor, neglected buggers manning the tables down in the Artist's Alley which had been strategically placed at the other side of the same enormous room. Yes, this was a good plan in theory, since it keeps all of the important bits together, but the scale of business just didn't balance out in practice, as spending frenzy and social interaction veered closer to the vendors. Nonetheless, just standing in one spot and watching thousands of lively fans mingling, posing for photos, and violently elbowing one another to grab that one rare Powerpuff Girls doujinshi, in itself, could provide hours of entertainment.
No mere photos could capture the complete and utter frenzy contained in this room.
Of course, I had no time for such primal forms of amusement as there were more pressing matters to attend to. After all, the industry representatives also had their own designated booths on the floor, with deals on their products, free goodies, and most importantly, a chance to chat with some people from each company. FUNimation not only continually reminded us that they were making a spectacle of themselves, but also that they were perfectly aware of it. The double-sized FUNimation booth dominated the centre aisle, and made it pretty easy to finally get a few words in with FUNimation PR guru Lance Heiskell. It also made tracking down the slightly eccentric Toon Zone reporter Karl Olson and his scheduling lackey Sketch pretty easy.
Lance shed some interesting light on quite a few things. Namely, the reason that the tapes YTV received for Fullmetal Alchemist had the shortened endings and the glitches and errors that occurred in the early Adult Swim airings (i.e.: Liza Hawkeye) was actually because YTV had insisted that they send them the tapes as fast as possible right after the deal was signed. As a result, they weren't able to get a full grasp of what version would be most suitable for broadcast on the station and just sent them the first version they sent to Adult Swim. However, when I told Lance that YTV had received those tapes, his response wasn't exactly PR friendly. So at least we know they care.
Also, as it probably goes without saying, Case Closed's initial twenty-six episodes on YTV are, indeed, a test to make sure the show takes before they commit themselves to it, and FUNi is really hoping that they do. All in all, I probably got more substantial info from the FUNimation booth than I did at the actual panel which was scheduled, then de-scheduled, then re-scheduled, then re-scheduled again for the next day. Indeed, like Bandai, an organized and consistent schedule was going to be a bit of a no-show at SakuraCon this year. But I'll talk about Bandai later.
Since I was just itching to wave my press pass in somebody's face, I joined Karl at the early Gun X Sword panel, where script writer Hideyuki Kurata, director Goro Taniguchi, character designer Takahiro Kimura, and voice actor Takanori Hoshino talked about the recent Geneon co-production which, they quite willingly confessed, was designed to be something of a Trigun knock-off. Together the quartet was quite a riot, although apparently the public panel which happened a few hours later was a lot more fun since they had a larger audience to play off of. When asked about distributing translations of their work, Goro and Hideyuki both emphasized that it was important to distribute it into as many languages as possible. Of course, when it was clarified for them that the question was referring to fansubs, they very quickly retracted that opinion and insisted that if you're going to watch something you need to pay for it. Sorry.
These guys were just nuts. And is the resemblance really that obvious?
The highlight, however, was when Goro Taniguchi, also the creator of Read or Die, randomly noted during the panel that Karl Olson bares an uncanny resemblance to Napoleon Dynamite. I'll allow you all to make your own judgements based on the above picture. In regards to Read or Die, Goro was asked if he had any plans to continue it, to which he replied that there was an upcoming puppet show version in the works. I'm pretty sure he was joking.
With prominent cardboard cut-outs lining the halls and ads and previews for the series springing up wherever they could fit, Geneon was trying their hardest to pimp Gun X Sword all throughout the con. They clearly invested a lot of money into producing it, but this extra earnestness leads one to believe Adult Swim probably turned the show down despite it being custom built for the block.
The AMV contest was the big draw of the night, and despite the fact that the main events hall was big enough to fit virtually every person who attended this con (which was well over 10 000, a dramatic increase from last year) and still squeeze a small tennis court somewhere in the middle, people still saw it necessary to form an enormous line outside of the room in anticipation for the event. Ultimately, though, most of the competing videos were a bit underwhelming. I didn't stay for the entire thing, so I’m not sure which video won, but the best one I saw wasn't actually a part of the contest. An extravagant, Bond-style City Hunter AMV featuring "A View To a Kill" by Duran Duran basically stole the show and, unfortunately, set unreasonably high expectations for the actual competing entries. That probably wasn't the best idea. (You can view the video here.)
I, alone, find this funny.
Despite the information being written in bold letters on top of the schedule, I managed to miss the fact that the Guest Reception dinner was being held at a nearby hotel that night. This meant, horror of horrors, that I needed to pay for my own dinner again. While the two Subways attached to the convention centre had long since closed at this point there was, quite thankfully, another one just two blocks away. Rather than make some attempt to wring humour out of the apparent over-abundance of Subways in the area, I'll point out that it was quite funny to see a big crowd of costumed con-goers lined up inside the restaurant.
Non-stop excitement on Friday night.
After the enormous line had dissipated, everyone finally regrouped at the dance. It was fun for a while, but when I discovered that the curfew for the con was, in fact, at 1am rather than 12am, meaning that the floor would be infested with kiddies for at least another hour, I decided to call it a night. But not before popping into the remarkably functional (at least in comparison to AE) karaoke room, and finally got the chance to witness Karl's freestyle rap. That was definitely one of the high points of the night - I even bought his CD.