Mon Oct 5, 2009 — by Alexandra Honigsberg

New York Anime Festival 2009 Wrap-up

Picture a world where people gather and interact in joy and harmony, where groups of gaily-clad youths break into spontaneous song and dance at regular intervals, where spontaneous conga lines of diverse peoples stretch for blocks and wind through the market stalls, where merchants sell and people buy with easy affability and business is brisk, where people debate the topics of the day with great thoughtfulness and passion and the powers-that-be listen to the people-at-large. The Twilight Zone? Are you some sort of philosopher, or something? Well…no and yes. I just spent a weekend at my first New York Anime Festival at the Javitz Center in Manhattan and I found myself intermittently amused, bemused, overwhelmed, and overjoyed.

Think about it. Everyone has watched an animated something in their lifetime, no matter how old. From Looney Tunes to Disney to Hanna-Barbera to Pixar, we’ve experienced this media and it has been used for everything from pure entertainment to social commentary. Much of what was seen in America during the ‘60s and ‘70s was actually from Japan – Speed Racer, Kimba the White Lion, Astro Boy, Gigantor, Tobor the 8^th Man – some of which are now known to a new generation only via CGI-heavy feature films. Yet this is far from past-tense kiddie land. With the global economy, the on-line connecting of the worlds, and all the ways we cross-pollinate each other’s cultures, just as Americans seem to be everywhere, so are the Japanese and the growing connections between East and West, from McDonald’s to manga.

My professional friends, The Anime Chicks, brought me into the anime fold only about three years ago with Rose of Versailles and The Legend of Basara, and a wise one passed along to me the original Full Metal Alchemist (also see subbed on hulu and other sites the new Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood, now up to ep 26 in Japan, which follows the manga more closely as anime and manga had diverged with the common delays between the two medias), which is sometimes too great for words and, as I’ve happily discovered, it’s consistently named in the top 5 anime ever in many fan and professional polls. This encouraged me to explore more: Death Note, Trinity Blood and, God help me, the never-ending Bleach, all enabled by my colleagues, our very own Scooby Gang. This lead to Saturday all-nighters on Cartoon Network with Moribito, Ghost in the Shell: 2^nd Gig, Code Geass: LeLouche of the Rebellion, Blood+, Big O (2^nd season), and Cowboy BeBop.

Watching these shows, I can understand why the youthful fans sing and dance, dressed-up like their fav characters, channeling the very humanity that these characters and stories embrace, in all their messiness, especially since the Japanese tend to tell anime stories with protagonists at their coming-of-age points of high school/college. Even in the midst of the most horrific of story lines, there is always that elusive, idealistic angel of mercy – Hope! If we go by their art forms, the Japanese are an essentially hopeful people, even when they dwell on death and conflict and blood, as much of this media does. This is a land that’s lived through WWII and nuclear holocaust, invasion, and the ever-present Meiji and Tokugawa eras’ warfare. Their PG-13 would be our R – we Americans are a lot more squeamish about blood and guts and violence – we’ve never lived through such things as they have. And yet, here comes Hope in all her glory through what we might call cartoons. I am nourished by the aesthetic of the art, itself – stunningly drawn landscapes with lighting and detail worthy of Fellini and even noir, and the intro and outro songs can become ear worms, for good or ill, causing me to study more Japanese. My mind could appreciate and parse and marvel at the talents of the actors and writers, animators, artists, and musicians – a veritable Wagnerian array of all the arts in collaboration – without getting knocked out of the very real emotions (emos) of the story. Anime makes me feel human and, obviously, by all the singing and dancing in our midst, it does much the same for many fans of all ages. This is aesthetics and its twin philosophy ethics at their best.

Being a philosopher and theologian with foci in the ancient and mediaeval worlds, classic Japanese literature and thus anime and manga tropes such as good and evil spirits, death gods (shinigami), institutional intrigue, clan conflicts, and warriors called upon often too-young in loss and grief to grow stronger in order to protect those they love and the things they believe in against all odds, foreign and domestic – they have always existed in my reality. Being from a traditional Italian-Sicilian family, the very Japanese themes of respect for elders and superiors and the closeness of brothers and family and the conflicts between sons and fathers are also very real. Am there, doing that. And working as a professional musician since my teens, I am always thinking about art. As I walked around and chatted with strangers who were sometimes more than passing strange but, most often, not strange at all, it seems that they, too, had gotten something more than just fun from anime and manga and its community. This is not just the Island of Misfit Toys. Twenty-five hundred years ago Plato in his Republic and Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics spoke of how to build the best society with the best people. It’s all relational. And it’s all about perfecting everything in life, elevating it to an art, which includes the physical – so swordplay (think the gymnasium), men bonding together for the greater good at all ages, women of beauty and grace, all part of the picture. True, I’m speaking of this world at its best. But that’s what philosophers do and that’s what I saw as I roamed the streets of NYAF land for the weekend and if it can happen there, the seeds are always there. Hope.

But even as a native New Yorker and a genre pro for 20 years, sometimes I felt very much like I was in my natural habitat and yet very much like Alexandra David-Neel in Tibet about a century ago. Friday was a very good, energetic, but calm intro. But Saturday’s crowd was daunting in the confined space of the Javitz Center’s windowless lower level, entombed in concrete with that horrible tungsten lighting that just sucks the life out of everything, despite the great, happy energy. Some peace returned on a grey, rainy Sunday to close things out. The bulk of the fans were in their teens and 20s and even most of the pros were 30-somethings, at most, though there were intergenerational groups and some solo intrepid adults with that same young-at-heart enthusiasm that I saw from the main crowd. And I’m told that the gender mix – now more females than males – was unheard of only a few years ago and that the range of ages in the field are widening on both ends even though the golden core is still the 18-34 market.

Programming ran nominally from 1-7 on Friday, 11-7 on Sat., and 11-5 on Sunday, with some special events in the eves on-site and at other venues, plus there was hanging at the bar at the main hotel, the refurbished classic Ramada New Yorker, once Rev. Moon’s New York headquarters. The convention was very accommodating to press, so we avoided the endless lines that the more popular events had to contend with. But it was always hard to tell what was going on with Javitz’s inherently bad lighting, bad acoustics, and the fact that no panelists ever had any name plates up on the dais or badges when you met them – so you were often clueless throughout panels as to who was who, though the picture profiles in the official program and on-line did help with this very necessary Sherlocking – but even they were incomplete and so some of my reporting lacks names accordingly. Despite any technical issues, the panelists, themselves, were of the community type: present, enthusiastic, accessible, and knowledgeable, whether from Japan or the States, and very eager to share the love of what they do and very interested in what the fans think and want.

There are morality plays everywhere in this culture, not just in the story lines and characters. Life imitates art and vice-versa. We had panels on and discussions in other panels about what it might take to address the issue of copyright. How do we get the Japanese product in DVDs and CDs and new media legally to the States in a timely manner and still protect copyright and still make an honest profit whilst not pricing things beyond what the public can reasonably pay? What about the hardworking and utterly talented voice actors who are paid the lowest scale in the business? What about dealers who sell edged weapons to minors and let them walk out with them unbound vs. those who sell and pack with the utmost integrity blades of artisan quality such as Dragon Song Weapons of St. Petersburg, FL? The dilemmas are there but the discussions are happening and, in that, there is Hope. This is beyond bi-partisan ‘cause, after all, we’re all of the Anime party, whatever our political leanings at home. For many, gatherings of this sort are home. It’s not escapism. It’s a forum, a town square gathering. Festival is, indeed, the right word.

The Friday panel on J-music in America had some heavy hitters on it – a Japanese DJ from www.samuraibeatradio.com, Keiko Shibata (SONY, NY), David Ho (Drama Fever), and promoter Hayden Relton (Superglorious). They traced the advent of Japanese music in the States from “Sukiyaki” in ’63 ‘til now. A big problem is that the promoters of the great bands who’re doing very well in Japan don’t want to interrupt their schedules to have their artists mount an expensive and time-consuming tour here, so the Indie bands are our best hope to hear what the trends are in Japan within a reasonable delivery time, legally – as well as being exposed via anime soundtracks and Cartoon Network, though then there’s always the problem of getting a legal import CD that can easily cost $30 at Kinokuniya. It’s much about perceptions and language barriers and each of us learning and growing more patient with each other’s cultures in order to share this art and thrive. Commerce has always been a cultural meeting place, more than the political. They’re working on ways to get things here sooner, in both English and Japanese, give the listeners value in a tough economy, and learn what marketing works in the States and how it differs from what they’ve been doing in Japan. Building bridges, global community. They’re listening to the fans, the consumers, as well as the bottom line. How many places can we say that about, especially lately? Hope.

There was a 3-day workshop (one panel daily) lead by New York City’s very own voice actors who have worked on everything from Pokemon to Utena (Veronica Taylor as Ash, Rachel Lillis as Utena, Jamie McGonnigal as Barry, and Tom Wayland as director/producer). Here are people who are actors, first, who dedicate large chunks of their lives for years to shows and still have to keep day jobs in order to survive and yet are still cheerful. Day 1 just talked about the basics, what it is, what they do, what do they like, what do they hear from the fans, etc. Day 2 was an actual vocal workout for a room jam-packed with fans, and Sunday continued that. Across the hall in another packed room was Kyle Hebert (Aizen in Bleach, Kiba in Naruto, and Falman in Full Metal Alchemist) actually taking on fan volunteers to do mock anime voice auditions and critiquing and directing them like pros (and some did very well, indeed!). This is the artistic and ethical action of paying forward so that the arts live on and we build good relationships in the process. It has been shown that for every $1 spent on the arts in a community it pays the community back in savings on other social programs (e.g., less juvenile delinquency, domestic violence, gangs, etc.) of about $10. Pretty good pay-offs for comics and cartoons, huh?

Sunday’s state of the Anime and Manga industry panel also had the heavy hitters with reps from Viz, Funimation, Vertical, Del Rey, and Bandai. They were relentlessly optimistic, despite economic woes on both sides of the world. They continue to work closely with authors and licensers since, in Japan, authors have a say in how their works are adapted (“Moral Clause”), protecting not only money, but the integrity of the artists’ work – capitalism and ethics at their best. Yes, that means that it takes a longer time for approvals, but we deal with that endlessly with intellectual properties from places like Paramount and yet they have thrived, so none of them saw maintaining their ethics as an undue burden. The price of doing business well.

Saturday evening was the ultimate show of collaborative arts – the masquerade. Here you have graphics, textiles, music, acting, dancing, stage craft (tech), and a bunch of people doing things for love (and sometimes money – like a free trip to Japan!). As usual at such shows, things ranged from the lame to the joyously silly (What L does on his day off…refer to Death Note) to the utterly, Hollywood, pro-level amazing (a full Bumblebee Transformer who then proceeded to dance!). People watch because they’re fascinated by the craft and they cheer for the triumphs and the sharing of their characters come to life, the sheer joy of being together.

The cosplay in the hallways was relentless, the most popular items being Ed and other State Alchemists (Full Metal Alchemist), Soul Reapers and Arrancars (Bleach), Anthe and friends (Utena), Naruto and company (think Harry Potter for ninjas), and Gothic Lolitas. The odd thing is that, quite often, they seemed to take more joy in playing the bad guys than the good guys. But, then again, as one costumer colleague of mine often points out – the clothes are always better on the dark side! No joke! Here are people bringing to life alter-egos, interesting personalities, conflict and power, in a safe and supportive environment, acting instead of acting-out. Catharsis a la Aristotle vs. what Plato negatively said about acting and poetry (it’s all lies and too much emotion!). And even from those playing the baddest of the badasses, I saw very little, if any, bad behaviour. It was freakin’ Woodstock for anime and manga geeks! Who’da thunk it? Building good will one shinigami at a time.

So the next time someone says to you that this is a waste of time and money, that it’s only cartoons and comics, childish obsessions, too much mindless violence, that it has nothing to do with real life and from which we learn nothing…well…just show them. Hope. As an alien-hunting character once said of his mashed potatoes, “This is important. This means something,” and look how that turned out!

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