Saturday
More browsing in the exhibition hall, more videos in the screening rooms. The highlight of Saturday was a panel discussion with Range (rhymes with Benjy) Murata, character designer and concept artist for Last Exile. Through a translator, he answered questions from the audience. We learned that he collects antique appliances, which goes a long way toward explaining the look of his wingless flying machines. One audience member asked an unfortunately long-winded question, about which appliance Range would merge with to fight off an invasion of alien ground sloths. He was pretty much shouted down by the rest of the audience.
Another audience member asked about the low pay and bad working conditions among anime artists in Japan, and if the industry was in danger of losing talented people. Range didn't respond specifically about the future of anime, but he did confirm that the animators are not well paid. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised by that. The cartoony arts of comics and animation are much more respected in Japan than America, and I always figured their creators got the respect they deserved as well. I guess every animation studio has its downtrodden in-betweeners. Range said he himself was lucky; as a designer, he gets paid better and enjoys his work more.
Saturday evening, Erik went to a gathering of cel collectors, while I took in a couple episodes of Ninja Scroll. There is a whole community of people who buy and sell cels, online and at conventions. Each cel is unique, of course. Sometimes they come with backgrounds, camera directions, pencil drawings, or other peripheral stuff. It's a strange thing to hold a cel in your hands, realizing it's the vehicle that brings an animated character to life, holding that character in a particular moment. However, hand-painting cels is a disappearing art. Almost all anime is now done with pencil drawings on paper that get scanned, and then cleaned up and colored on the computer. Needless to say, it's a dismaying development for cel collectors.
Sunday
More Stuff browsing, more video watching. We went to another panel discussion: Myung-Jin Lee, Korean creator of Ragnarok. Erik had brought some Ragnarok manga that I got to read beforehand. As the title suggests, it's somewhat based on Nordic folklore, but with the unmistakable look and feel of anime. Ragnarok is highly popular, and has been made into a wildly successful massively-multiplayer computer game. Myung-Jin fielded more questions about the game than about the manga or anime. Apparently he works closely with the game developers on all aspects, including balancing player classes and other gameplay issues. It's nice to see the creator so highly involved in the adaptation of his work. An American game company would probably restrict his role to concept artist, if he had any role at all after licensing the property. If I remember right, Ragnarok is Myung-Jin Lee's first major project. He's a young next big thing, dividing his time between video games and manga. All the rest of us are jealous.
Sunday night, there were fireworks all over town for some reason. Oh, wait, it was the Fourth of July.
Monday
The last day. In the morning was the AMV encore presentation and awards ceremony (see Friday). In the afternoon was the charity auction. Erik was curious about the auction, and I was curious about everything, so we went. The proceeds went to City of Hope, a hospital and research center for childhood diseases. They had a wide variety of merchandise, including videos, posters, and figurines signed by various people. Several posters that had been signed by whole production staffs went for over $100. The oddest item was a candy sculpture that one of the special guests had been inspired to make at a convention center candy cart.
Original drawings were the big ticket items. A thick stack of pencil drawings from Hellsing went for $725. Not surprising, since drawings like this are the nearest equivalent to cels that Hellsing will ever see. Range Murata had a few lithographs that sold for $300-$700, and pencil drawings of Last Exile characters that went from $960 to $2000. Some artists had contributed ink drawings on pencilboard, which did very well: the three main characters from ROD fetched $1000, $1900, and $2000, and a Gungrave drawing went for $2500. The last item was a colored ink drawing of characters from Wolf's Rain, which sold for $8000!
Finally, it was time for the Closing Ceremonies. By this time I expected the expo would be fairly emptied out, as most of the attendants went back to their daily lives... but there were plenty of die-hards who stuck around until the end. At the Opening Ceremonies on Friday, the crowd was giddy and friendly. By Monday evening, they were punchy. The same two MCs came out and had to face some heckling from the audience. (Not mean-spirited heckling, but it threw them off a bit.) We learned what a fiasco Friday registration had been, and why, and how they planned to prevent such things in the future. All the special guests came back out and said their thank-yous and goodbyes. And finally, the clay idol was brought out, the second eye was painted in, and it was over.
We had a ball, and I'm sure we'll do it again sometime.
