Friday
Friday morning was the Opening Ceremonies. We didn't know what they would do, but decided to check it out. It took place in the convention center ballroom, where each day's main events took place. There were two MCs, one who spoke English and one who translated into Japanese. Every time the Japanese MC spoke, the crowd erupted into cheers. My theory on this is, if you watch enough subtitled anime, it forms a strong association between the sound of the Japanese language and enjoying a fantasmagoric yarn. Seems like a sad phenomenon on the face of it-- centuries of glorious culture reduced to background noise in sci-fi cartoons? But many anime fans love all things Japanese. In fact this year's Expo had a Summer Festival theme, and showcased traditional Japanese food, clothes, and festival activities. (That's what they said at the opening ceremonies, anyway. We didn't see many traditions that predated Astro Boy.)
After welcoming all of us, the MCs introduced some special guests from Japan. These included voice actors, directors, designers, and two singers. I expected the directors and pencil jockeys to be the stars of the show, probably because I'm a comics guy and I think of the visual artists as anime's driving force. But the vocalists got the biggest cheers by far. One guy (Tomokazu Seki) demonstrated voices for 3 or 4 characters. I was amazed. He stood on stage and brought to life a blowhard muscleman, a deadly martial artist, and a whiney obnoxious whiner. I've always preferred subtitles and the original voices to English dubbed anime. Dub voice actors are usually terrible, and any awkwardness in the translation is more glaring. (Occasionally an anime film gets backing from a major studio for a US theatrical release, and more effort is spent on the translation. Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away are good examples.)
At first I thought the voice actors got all the cheers because they were the nearest thing to the actual characters appearing in the flesh... but maybe their contribution to the art of anime is bigger than I thought. American animation starts by recording the voices. The characters are then drawn to move according to the rhythms of the actor's voice. Disney's animated films always use highly exaggerated motion to emphasize every nuance and cadence in the actor's speech. With Japanese animation, the drawing comes first. Voice actors record their lines while watching the film, and time their speech to match the drawings. Compared to Western animation, the movements in anime are highly restrained. Oh sure, you get those crazy extended shots of a character flying through the air and landing a kick on someone's face, with the background all streaked out. But even then, the character's body position doesn't change much. Plus, it's very common to have single-cel shots, where nothing moves but the camera; sacrilege in Western animation! So maybe there's an over-the-top exaggeration in anime voices that corresponds to the character motion in Western animation. It's hard to tell, without knowing Japanese.
At the end of the opening ceremonies, they brought out a squat clay doll with blank white eyes (there's a name for this thing, but I don't remember it). One of the guests was invited to paint in the pupil of the right eye. This is a Japanese tradition for bringing good luck at the launch an event or enterprise. When it's all over, you get to paint in the other eye.
After our initial forays into the Stuff Room and screening rooms, it was time for the AMV contest. AMV stands for Anime Music Video. This is where fans splice together clips from one or more anime shows and put it to music. Erik introduced me to AMVs a year ago, with a Quicktime file he had on CD-ROM called Tainted Donuts. (For clarity's sake, all AMV titles will appear in bold, other titles in italics.) At the time I thought it was cool, but I didn't fully appreciate how cool this particular one is until after the expo. It's set to a Japanese hip-hop type song, but you don't need the song lyrics to get the video. Tainted Donuts weaves together clips from Cowboy Bebop and Trigun into a clever anime crossover, where Spike and the bounty hunters of Cowboy Bebop are after Vash the Stampede, Trigun's lovable outlaw. Lots of the interaction is achieved by simply juxtaposing clips from the two shows, but sometimes the characters get digitally inserted into the same scenes. The editing is so smooth, it's often hard to tell which show is the source for which scene. The narrative of the video is top notch; it starts with Spike, Jet and Faye getting the bounty, then follows the movements of Vash and the bounty hunters for awhile. A trap is laid (using donuts) and finally comes the epic showdown.
In my brief exposure to AMVs, I have formed some strong opinions about them. Many AMVs simply retell the story of the source anime, compressed into about four minutes and usually to the tune of some hard rock song. These can be fun, but beg the question, why bother? Isn't it a disservice to your favorite anime to reduce the story to less than five minutes of highlights? The best AMVs are in the tradition of collage artists, or digital sampling artists such as Negativland; they assemble material from various sources to create something new, or to shed new light on the source material itself. I know, I'm taking this all too seriously. Well, you try watching hours of AMVs without contemplating how you would make your own.
The show was scheduled to start at 8:00 pm.We got to the ballroom a little early. They were showing AMVs from years past on the several large screens. This pre-show programming ended up going almost until 9:00. Apparently the one computer that had all the competing videos had been smashed, and we had to wait through some last minute DVD burning. However, I don't think you could ask for a better survey of anime than all the AMVs we sat through. Five minutes of highlights may be a poor substitute for the full anime, but it gives you a good idea of the style and theme. I found this helpful for the rest of the expo, as we consulted the screening schedule and chose which videos to see.
There are four categories in the expo contest: drama, comedy, action, and AMTV. The fourth category emphasizes professional quality editing and the overall craftsmanship. Each category had ten entries. Members of the audience got to vote on a winner in each category, and an overall best of show. The winners would be announced at an awards ceremony on Monday. We had to wait in suspense to find out the winners, but you get to hear about it right away. Each AMV has a title. Sometimes it's just the title of the song, sometimes a mix of the song and anime titles. Most of the anime I didn't recognize, so I couldn't tell you if the title related to it.
Early in the drama category was an execrably torturous piece of drek: Celine Dion's My Heart will Go On, over really awful low-poly 3D computer graphics. Either this person used a video game for source animation, or the worst all-digital feature film ever. I just can't fathom the motivation behind this one. I considered voting for Broken Dreams, a bloody medieval video that used Metallica's One, but I had to choose Cry Little Idol. This used Cry Little Sister from the Lost Boys soundtrack, a cheesey song by itself, but the imagery was staggering. It involved a deformed/disabled guy stalking a female singer. It's possible this video did exactly what I said I don't like in AMVs-- simply retelling and compressing the anime-- but it was powerful. It was almost too painful to sit through again at the awards ceremony. But even more painful was the fact that @#%& Celine Dion Meets Crappy 3D Graphics won the drama category! Clearly there is a segment of anime fandom I just don't get.
Most of the comedy entries were fairly forgettable, but there were a few gems. The winner was Disney in D Minor, which had characters from Naruto singing the marketplace song from Aladdin. Naruto is a young boy studying to be a ninja, who often wreaks havoc in his academy. The clever synching of imagery with the music was entertaining, even though we knew nothing about Naruto. By Monday, we had both read some Naruto manga, and the video was even better. The entry Erik and I voted for was Hale's Mom, which used a humorous anime that featured some kids in a tropical setting, and a song called Stacy's Mom has Got it Goin' On. As you might guess, the song is about a kid who has the hots for his friend's mom. The video reversed things and had the little girl singing about the little boy's mom, with the boy becoming more and more appalled. The final comedy video was called FOOTBALL! The music was one of Strongbad's songs (starts out "the system is down... ") The screen was broken up into smaller frames, with anime schoolgirls synching to the various audio tracks of Strongbad's a capella techno. It was freakin' hilarious, and I almost voted for itÉbut it just seemed too easy, making a comedy video out of a Strongbad song. But even without my vote, FOOTBALL! won best in show.
The action category had some good stuff too. One called And That's That used footage from FLCL (pronounced "foolie coolie"). I've never seen FLCL, but Erik tells me it's really weird and I would like it. It did make for one of my favorite AMVs. Another good one was Grand Theft Megadeus. It began with a mission screen mimicking the game Grand Theft Auto, then went into a giant robot anime with a stylized, roaring 20's sort of vibe. Naruto showed up again in Rock and a Hard Place, an arena battle between a speedy guy and a weird sand-controlling guy with rave music. This video finally prompted me to pick up Naruto #1 from one of the manga dealers. After reading it, I had to get #2 and #3. I voted for this video, and it actually won.
The AMTV category featured the same stupid 3D footage we saw in drama, minus Celine Dion. It still sucked. (Attention! It did NOT suck! Please see Apology) The winner was Personal Jesus, featuring the Depeche Mode song, a witch hunter character (I think) with horizontal pigtails, and a screen divided into panels that flipped around to the beat. One entry got lost in the last-minute DVD shuffle. We did get to see it at the awards ceremony-- it used footage from various chapters of The Animatrix. I probably would have voted for it if we had seen it. Because he had missed out on the voting, the guy who made it got the same grand prize that best in show got: a director's chair, signed by all the expo's special guests. The organizers may have been disorganized, but they made good on their errors in the end.
So what does one do after a long day of taking in Japanese animation? One heads back to the hotel and turns on Cartoon Network! Restraint? Moderation?? Pshaw!!
