The Anime Almanac

Three weeks ago, Reed Exhibitions announced that they would be merging the New York Anime Festival and the New York Comic Con for one major convention in 2010. The next day, I posted an editorial about my disappointment over the news. I felt that when the two conventions merged, we would be losing one good convention.

Peter Tarara, Programing Manager for Reed and the man in charge of the Anime Festival, immediately responded to my blog post with an email and an invitation to talk one-on-one with him on the issue. So I spoke with Peter last week to learn more about the motivation for the merge and what it will mean for New York’s anime fans:

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Which came first, the fact that you had to do C2E2 in the spring or that you had to do the New York Comic Con in the fall?

C2E2 came first. We were having conversations with the Javits Center over dates for the Comic Con, and we couldn’t get dates for the spring. We could have opted to have it super, super early in the year or much later in the spring. But when we finally had the spring dates finalized for C2E2, that very quickly put us in the mind frame to change the Comic Con to the fall.

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When Otakon announced that one of their Sunday performers would be Portland-born rock singer Becca, pretty much everybody I knew had the same reaction:

Who is this American girl and why is she performing at Otakon?

What we didn’t know was the unique story of an American rock singer who had already made a name for herself in Japan. But despite her success overseas, she was virtually unknown in her home country. And so her management team are trying to remedy this with a US marketing strategy aimed at fans of anime and manga.

And her appearance at Otakon was the first step in this plan.

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When the Japanese company Aniplex held an industry panel at Anime Boston last May, their emphasis on the unlicensed series Kannagi: Crazy Shrine Maidens baffled the audience and bloggers.

“Why are they spending so much time talking about Kannagi?”

“The show’s still unlicensed, right? What’s the point?”

“Do they want the fans to pressure American distributors to license it?”

“Do they really expect us to get hyped over this series at this point?”

I was reminded of another industry panel last year held by the Japanese company Kadokawa. That representative was there to introduce the American fans to new Japanese series and get them to demand it to be licensed in America. The problem with this plan is that since broadband internet had become so widely available in recent years, the fans were already well aware of these new titles and had probably already watched them.

So was Aniplex being just as ignorant as Kadokawa was with this Kannagi business?

“Well, we already had the Kannagi license back at Anime Boston,” says Bandai’s Marketing Director Robert Napton in an interview with me two weeks ago at Otakon. “That was the first time we were coordinating with Aniplex in what to say and what not to say. This has been in the planning stages for a few months.”

It wasn’t an act of ignorance on behalf of the Japanese company this time. It was the initial step in one the largest marketing ploys that the US anime industry has seen in years. And from the point of view of this blogger, I thought it was a tremendous success.

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I first heard about Oshiri Kajiri Mushi, or “The Butt Biting Bug”, from the popular blog Boing Boing in August 2007. According to the blog, this children’s cartoon was the biggest craze in Japan at the time:

The repeating monotonic line “Oshiri kajiri mushi…” ingrained the song into my brain so much that I ended up singing the tune to myself for the rest of the day. I also found the cartoon to be hilarious, especially how the bug goes through samurai endurance training to get back his motivation for butt biting.

My fascination and love with the cartoon has not gone away in the two years since then, so when I found out that Delvi of UrumaDelvi, the husband-and-wife team who created the bug, was going to be in New York last weekend, I leapt at the chance to talk with her about the popular short and their career in animation.

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Why do we care so much whenever our favorite novel, comic, or cartoon is adapted into a live-action movie? After all, we already have the original version right there in front of us, and we know that something in the story is going to be lost when squeezed into a 2-hour-long flick. So why do we care so much when that story is shown back to us on the big screen?

I think the reason is because when you see the story on the big screen being portrayed by real life actors, it feels more real and authentic. It gives the fan the notion that the fictional world could happen in real life. Even with something so deep in fantasy as the Lord of the Rings saga could actually look realistic when done as a big budget Hollywood blockbuster.

Viz has recently released Naoki Urasawa’s 20th Century Boys and Pluto in America, and both series have been taking manga critics by storm. When everyone submits their “Best of 2009″ lists at the end of this year, you can bet that those two titles will be placed at the top of many of those lists.

They are most certainly at the top of my list right now. As the newest member of the Urasawa fan club, I was very eager to see the first two films of the 20th Century Boys live-action trilogy being shown at the New York Asian Film Festival last weekend.

So did these films succeed in bringing the original comics to life on the big screen?

Yes, oh god yes, they did! (^_^)

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