Anime Boston 2010 Con Report - Saturday (Part 2)
Saturday, continued
Yesterday I was trying to figure out why, even though I'd attended the panel on "Character Designing, Anime and Western", I couldn't remember any of it. After a night's sleep, I remembered why: it was a panel specifically for artists, talking more about how to render characters in a particular visual style through use of particular drawing techniques, and not very much that would be applicable to someone who wasn't themselves applying pen to paper or stylus to tablet. Interesting panel, but not perhaps something I could make much use of.
After that was a fun and informative panel called "Bite-Sized Anime," on anime that are rarely known over here because of their short length. I had actually not heard of any of them except one, Di Gi Charat, and I had never seen any. They were all pretty surreal in some way or other, especially "Miss Critical Moment" (about a woman caught in some bizarre implausible cliffhanger situation each episode) and "Moegaku*5" (about a magical girl who goes around helping otaku, and incidentally giving the audience a language lesson in one of five different languages.)
After that, I decided to stay for the "FUNimation Industry Panel", which is where I found out about their release of old Shaw Brothers kung-fu flicks, and, well, a lot of other stuff I'd never really heard of before. About the only thing I recognized was "Dragonball Z" or more precisely "Dragonball Z Kai," which is Akira Toriyama going back to Dragonball Z and not only improving the artwork, but trimming out the filler. You can bet that got a hell of a lot of applause.
After that, I went over to Trader Joe's to grab something for dinner (I got a little too much, so it ended up being the next day's dinner as well) and waited for a very very long time in a very very long line for the much anticipated "Bad Anime, Bad!" panel. This is like the "Totally Lame Anime" panel but instead of showing selected pieces from lots of different crappy productions, this panel focuses on a single piece of ... animation, and covers it in greater detail. This time around, it was a production that "Totally Lame Anime" has shown clips of many, many times, an anime version of "Frankenstein" that turns the "tragedy" knob up to 11, and supplements the original narrative with the antics of, as the panel host called it, "CSI: Bavaria." The feature ran a little short, so we saw clips from other quality anime, including "Attack of the Supermonsters" and "Magnos the Robot" to fill the block. A good time was had by all.
The next panel, "How Not To Write Fiction, Fan and Otherwise", sounded like it was going to be a nicely snarky review of some classic badfic; instead, it was some fairly basic advice on fiction and fanfiction writing, sometimes phrased as "how not to" and sometimes as "how to". The audience in general seemed to be at a level to get a lot from it, though.
Sadly, because of when the trains run on weekends, I could only stay for 15-20 minutes of the "Anime Hell" panel, which is a bit closer to "whatever crazy video crap we can dig up, whether it's anime or not." A homemade commercial for a furniture store in the South that insists over and over it's a place where both white people and black people can buy furniture? ("And Hispanics too!") Clips of Vincent Price doing magic tricks in 3-D? Footage from an awful movie where all the ninjas have the big gaudy headbands reading "Ninja", or possibly "Nin * Ja" across the front? It's all good! But soon I had to leave it behind to catch my train, and so another day at the con came to an end.