The Anime Almanac

In the top floor area of the historical Webster Hall venue in downtown New York City, a sold out house of anime and music fans wait patiently for a show to begin. It is the weekend of the New York Anime Festival, and on this Sunday evening, the fans are showing fatigue from days worth of events. Upon entry to the venue, they were given a pink glow stick and a red handkerchief for reasons yet unknown.

The house lights dim, the stage lights go on, and an announcer blasts, “Are you ready?” to the crowd’s enthusiastic applause.

Then suddenly sixteen girls, with ages ranged from 14 to 21, step onto the stage and begin performing a synchronized song and dance. It is quite a sight to see so many pretty girls occupy one single stage like this. Their opening song, an upbeat number called “Aitaikatta”, greets the crowd with Japanese lyrics that translate to,”We’ve missed you all, we’ve missed you all, we’ve missed you all, yes!”

Sure, the pitch perfect vocals going through the speakers were all prerecorded, but that did not seem to matter to the predominately male audience. Their bouncy choreography got the crowd hyped up and waving their glow sticks to the sugar coated beat of their music. And for extra fan service, their catholic school girl outfits were specially weighted so that their skimpy skirts would flare up with every turn, innocently exposing their black undergarments.

Cute, sexy, cheerful, and pure, the girls of AKB48 are to these nerdish men what the Jonas Brothers are to American teenage girls. But the j-idol phenomena is rarely seen outside of Japan, so for most of these native New York otaku, this was their first time seeing a show like this in person.

And what better idol show to see for your first time than the most popular group in Japan these days?

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Masago has the best older brother a girl could ask for. Shiro is popular. He’s goofy. He’s good looking. He’s the head of his student council. But most of all, he’s a kind boy and loves his little sister dearly.

But his niceness and his love ultimately leads to his death as he is accidentally hit by a car while protecting Masago from being hit by it herself. Masago and all of her classmates are devastated over Shiro’s tragic death, and while she cries out for her big brother, a gust of wind blows in through the window into her room.

Next thing you know, Masago is her older brother. That is, Shiro’s soul now possesses the body of his little sister, and they alternate back and forth for who controls the girl’s body or not. They believe it is because Shiro left the world with unfinished business. Now with the help of his little sister, they will set out to ensure his soul can finally move on to the other side, all the while trying to keep the fact that Shiro’s soul is inside his sister a secret.

Hold on… you go through that huge, tragic setup just to create a story of two people sharing the same body?! Really?! What kind of contrived plot is that?!  Have we not seen this done a million times before?!

I wanted to hate Ken Saito’s Oh! My Brother on this premise alone, I really did.  But with all of its charm and subtle comedy, I ended up loving this goofy – albeit flawed – shojo story.

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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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Even before I became an anti-piracy advocate, I had a bone to pick when “professional” anime news site Anime News Network began reviewing TV shows that were not legally available in America and could only be obtained through online piracy. The website began doing this to drive up web traffic and to compete with the ever growing number of non-profitable amateur anime blogs. I felt that a website making money from ad revenue shouldn’t be promoting piracy and profiting off of it like this.

On October 1, 2009, ANN once again began posting reviews of anime shows from the Fall 2009 season, some of which are still not legally available in America. So to spread awareness of this horrible profit-off-of-piracy scheme the website has going, I’m reposting my original essay from last year and starting a 30-day boycott of the site on my Twitter feed.

Originally posted on April 16, 2008:

In Search of Number Nine brought up a very good observation last weekend. Why is the popular anime news website, Anime News Network, doing a spring anime preview? The website has dabbled in such articles in the past, usually being written by an anonymous collection of the websites’ writers and presented in one long feature. But this season, they’re going all out with promising 24/7 reporting of all the new shows fresh from Japan. It’s a move that appears to be blending the website with the anime blogging community, and I must say, I think I preferred it if they stayed where they were before…

Anime News Networks promotes “24-7” coverage of new anime shows

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Don’t you mean Webster Hall New York City?

On Site:

Deb Aoki from About.com: Manga	Erica Friedman from Okazu	Scott from The Anime Almanac
Jon I. from JANAiBlog	Edward Sizemore from Comics Worth Reading	OutOfTimeProd from Out Of Time Productions
DJ Ranma S from Anime Jam Session	Brigid from MangaBlog	Vampt Vo from Ani-Gamers
Greg	ANN_Bamboo	NYAF from New York Anime Festival
Dave from Subatomic Brainfreeze	Ed Chavez from Vertical Inc.	Reni Mimura from ReniReni.com
funimation	Peter Tatara from New York Anime Fest	bandaient
Patz from The Gaming Dungeon	Carl from Ogiue Maniax

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FACT: Scott likes cute girls in short skirts…

On Site:

Scott from The Anime Almanac	Deb Aoki from About.com: Manga	Jon I. from JANAiBlog
DJ Ranma S from Anime Jam Session	Edward Sizemore from Comics Worth Reading	Michael Pinto from Anime.com
NYAF from New York Anime Festival	OutOfTimeProd from Out Of Time Productions	Greg
Vampt Vo from Ani-Gamers	Brigid from MangaBlog	Vince A
Hisui from Reverse Thieves	Dave from Subatomic Brainfreeze	Ed Chavez from Vertical Inc.
ANN_Bamboo	funimation	Reni Mimura from ReniReni.com
Patz from The Gaming Dungeon	Erica Friedman from Okazu	Carl from Ogiue Maniax

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So what’s the protocol for taking a photo inside of the bathroom?

On Site:

Scott from The Anime Almanac	OutOfTimeProd from Out Of Time Productions	Erica Friedman from Okazu
Brigid from MangaBlog	Jon I. from JANAiBlog	Deb Aoki from About.com: Manga
NYAF from New York Anime Festival	Vince A	Edward Sizemore from Comics Worth Reading
Greg	funimation	Michael Pinto from Anime.com
TOKYOPOP	DJ Ranma S from Anime Jam Session	Dave from Subatomic Brainfreeze
ANN_Bamboo	Narutaki from Reverse Thieves	Carl from Ogiue Maniax
Kyle Hebert	Peter Tatara from New York Anime Fest	Reni Mimura from ReniReni.com
Patz from The Gaming Dungeon	Ed Chavez from Vertical Inc.	Hisui from Reverse Thieves
bandaient

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… and on the eighth day, God created Manga Cake!

On Site Today:

Deb Aoki from About.com: Manga	Scott from The Anime Almanac	Michael Pinto from Anime.com
NYAF from New York Anime Festival	Patz from The Gaming Dungeon	Reni Mimura from ReniReni.com
Peter Tatara from New York Anime Fest	bandaient

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Hey otaku, did you hear that Disney bought Marvel?

It’s an acquisition that has been the subject of many jokes and ridicule from the snarky community of the online peanut gallery.

Disney has been known for generations as the people behind the world’s most popular cartoon characters and family friendly kiddy fair. Most recently, the company has been striking major success with targeting the prepubescent female demographic, or “tweens” as it’s been called, with series like Lizzy McGuire, Hannah Montana, and the Jonas Brothers.

The acquisition of the major comic book company seemed completely random to the fanboy community as Marvel has very little to do with Mickey Mouse or Hannah Montana. So most, if not all, of the comments from that peanut gallery had to do with how Disney would change these super hero franchises in order to target these inappropriate demographics.

Otaku themselves had their own mini version of the Marvel acquisition when Viz Media announced that the popular Naruto Shippuden series would begin airing on the new TV network Disney XD. Naruto, a fairly violent action series targeted towards boys, seemed to also go against the ideal of Disney being the squeaky clean outlet for little kids and tweens. So once again came the snark of how Disney will ruin the popular anime franchise.

But if we nerds would take the time to stop ragging on Mickey Mouse and Hannah Montana for a second or two, we’d actually see that they might be on to something with this Disney XD channel.

In fact, Disney XD could be to anime in the upcoming decade what the Cartoon Network was to anime in the past decade.

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Sgt. Keroro is a frog from outer space on a mission to invade Earth and enslave the human race. There’s a small problem – he’s a complete idiot. His plan for world domination is cut short when he is accidentally discovered by the Hinata family after hiding out in their household. The humans quickly out wit the simple alien to give up on his plans and take care of their housework instead. And so hilarity ensues as Keroro and his alien comrades attempt to restart their quest to take over the world, only to have their plans foiled by their own incompetence each and every time.

I call the Sgt. Frog manga, “the best manga series you have never read.” On the outside, it looks like a children’s series, as the simple character designs of the amphibian aliens gives off a Hello Kitty level of cuteness that often turns off most American otaku.

But if you actually picked up one of these books and read through the first chapter, you would discover a really funny and really geeky comic. There are plenty of otaku-related jokes and enough light fan service that any manga fan could easily get into it. On top of that, the humor is random and wacky, but not as over-the-top as most Japanese gag comics are. This translates very well into English, and it seemed to me like a happier version of the American cult-classic cartoon Invader Zim more than anything else.

I love the manga series, so I had very high expectations when ADV had originally announced their acquisition of the Sgt. Frog anime adaptation. But like most recent ADV acquisitions, it eventually ended up in the hands of FUNimation. About a year ago, FUNi had released a “pilot” dubbed episode of the series onto their Youtube channel and asked for feedback from the fans.

“We took all that feedback,” says FUNimation rep Adam Sheehan to a packed room at Otakon last July, “and we made the decision not to change a damn thing.” This declaration of keeping the original funny script intact was met with a huge cheer from the Otakon audience, including yours truly.

But Sheehan was wrong. They did change a damn thing. They actually changed a lot of damn things about the original script. They changed so much of it that the overall tone of the English adaptation is far different from that of the Japanese version.

And oh my God, did they ruin this once great series! (T_T)

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