Thursday, June 9, 2011

Anime Central: A Retrospective

Hello Cadets, hope you have all been well. I attended Anime Central last weekend and am still catching up on some much needed rest from the excitement of the weekend. Now there were a few highs and lows and we will cover them as well as a couple of shout outs.

First day was not so bad, the hotel rooms were actually ready before 2 p.m. this year which is a first for me so kudos to the Hyatt. Once that was all said and done I went off exploring. As per usual there were wonderful cosplays and the dealer's room was a bundle of chaos, but this is not new. Anime Hell was good despite starting late as usual but this year there was a lot of new material. I made new friends and the congoers where a lot more mellow with the exception of the entitled few that think they are the only ones that matter (this does happen).

There were a few gripes I had about the way it was run. First major issue were the autograph sessions. For anyone who went did you see the section in the program with the autograph schedule? Yeah, me neither. This year the autograph area was not made known in the program or to the staff. The schedule was made on the day of and posted in the autograph area at 11am the day of the signing so kiss any photoshoots or panels at that time goodbye. To me this was an ineffective set-up and detrimental to anyone who had plans to be anywhere on these days as you cannot plan the day accordingly this way. I hope this was a trial and error that they realize ended in severe error and will not happen again next year.

Also there was another issue with the set-up as, let's face it, if the program can't tell you where stuff is you will ask the nearest I.R.T. or help booth where to go. On four separate occasions I did this and was told they didn't know and to go elsewhere to ask them. The people at the booth that are there specifically to answer these questions didn't even know, which is just wrong. The staff being so uninformed should not have happened and this is nothing against those who I spoke to, it's those who were in charge of making sure this information was available who need to realize this mistake. I hope next year will not be a repeat of this terrible blunder.

I did attend two press conferences which were a lot of fun and all too short. The first being with Michael Sinterniklaas, an American voice actor who is currently the voice of Dean Venture. I am going to say right now that he is by far one of the coolest guests to ever come to ACEN. He not only stopped for photos in the hall and after the conference but he also did snippets of his roles as Dean and even Brad Crawford of Weiss Kreuz. I do have a video that will be up soon on my youtube channel of the short interview and his quick reprise as Crawford.

The other press conference I was able to attend was the one for FLOW. Again, what great guests. They were energetic and polite and when answering questions they looked straight at you the whole time, even while the translator was repeating the answer for us in English. The video for that conference will be posted soon as well.

Next year is the 15th anniversary of ACEN and I do hope those few kinks are worked out. Overall they still bring interesting guests and have managed to surprise me all over again. With that in mind I will depart to continue working on my uploads. This is War Kitten signing off and reminding you that no matter what, it is unpleasant walking into a room full of guys watching hentai together (true story).