| July 17, 2000 |
Paul Kiemele |
Well after Otafest 200 here at the University Of Calgary I was pretty peeved about the movie crew that invaded the area Otafest was booked
for. But if you want to read about the rant for Otafest read the one on my homepage "Plutopia's Homepage"
but this page is reserved for the first day of Animathon 7 up in Edmonton. Well after being on a Greyhound bus for over 5 hours form Calgary to
Edmonton I was pretty tired when I arrived at 12:10 in the morning. Twenty minutes later I was kicked out of the terminal for its 12:30 closure. So I then
walked around downtown Edmonton taking in some of the sights that I could at midnight. So I then moved myself down to Denny's on 104th avenue and 107th street,
the staff there was really nice and seated me promptly. Minutes after I sat down I ordered a coffee and looked through the breakfast menu. Later on I
ordered the Grand Slam Breakfast with two eggs, two pancakes, two sausages and two strips of bacon. I was actually hoping for it to arrive a little later
than it actually did, but oh well I took my time to eat it. For the four hours that I was there in Denny's I had so much coffee for $1.69, I must have had
somewhere between 7 to 8 cups of coffee that day. At around 4:00 I paid for my meal and coffee which turned out to be $7.00, cheaper than I had expected....
So after paying I walked around downtown Edmonton for a little while before heading back to the Greyhound station to wait for it to re-open at 5:00.
Meanwhile while I was sitting outside I was approached by so many homeless people, scaring the hell out of me, that something was going to happen to me, but
nothing did and I was safe as long as they didn't start fighting again, which happened to be about 3 meters from my location at the main doors on the East side of
the building. When the terminal opened I found a seat close to the south side and tried to get some sleep before Animathon 7 began at 9:00. So I
did get about a good 3 hours of sleep before I headed to Grant MacEwan Community College. Now starts the fun part of my journey ANIMATHON 7.
8:30 they were short handed and had to grab some people from the crowd that had gathered in front of the info desk, which was actually 4 tables and a white
board. Otafest actually had a real Info desk and a cash box on hand to provide change. Animathon didn't even have their cash box on hand and so I had to
wait to pay for my guide book with the $20 bills that I had on hand. But after a little while they did have enough change for me and I got my guidebook,
which was a 11" x 8.5" booklet in black and white, not colour in some parts like Otafest's, and the schedule was done poorly with the center being cut
out because of the printer they used... which was done in a 600 dpi laser printer. The images that were used in the guidebook were repeated several times,
and in some cases were very pixilated, major over kill on the Cowboy Bebop pictures, and they had a couple of Dojinshi manga, some of which made no sense... Card
Captor Kenshin and Kaia's review of Animathon. Now the Dealer room was huge and there was nine different dealers there form all over Canada, the furthest being
from Ottawa. Luthian Enterprises was there again, but didn't get any help at setting up like he did here at Otafest, none of the vendors did get help but
they did bring tons of stuff, Videos, DVD's, Manga, CD's, Apparel, Posters, G-kits, and a lot more stuff that's hard to explain. I myself bought $80 worth of
anime related stuff, 3 CD's and 4 posters, which were Kare-Kano Act 1.0, Slayers Next Sound Bible 3, and BGC 2040 Soundtracks, and 1 Eva, 1 Nadesico, and 2 Oh My
Goddess! Posters.
The viewing rooms were huge and stadium seating which was a plus, the large screen and big sound was cool, but the location of the projector proved to be
poorly placed, many people walked in front of it and blocked the view. In rooms 7 & 8 the rooms were hot and stuffy providing poor ventilation for the
number of people that were there to watch Mononoke Hime, and Macross Plus the Movie. The people that were counting the people in the rooms counted me at
least 6 different times. There were too many dubs and many of the anime that was being showed was also at Otafest, which counted for almost half of
Animathon, But I did get to see a subtitled version of Mononoke Hime.
Some of the special events that they had at Animathon 7 was the Fanfic Panel and a Display room , which didn't get too much attention because of it's location
away from everything else, the Anime Rants and Cosplay which I want to bring to the next Otafest, and maybe get more people in on the Live taping of Seagulls
Under Rocks. The Fanfic Panel proved to be very useful to some people and and provided good information on how to write good fanfics. The anime rants
was fun and hilarious providing people to comment about the Hack and Slash techniques of many companies when they air anime on North American TV, and about the
two different forms of the same show, one for the Younger audience ant the other of the more mature audience. At the end of the rant session the the 5 anime
gurus did a song routine, "Eva Man" the parody of James Bond and Austin Powers theme songs. The Cosplay was very well done and many people showed up and
participated in it, showing off their costumes, a few of the people dressed up as Wedding Peach characters, 2 Sailor Jupiter's, 2 Misty's, Larva, Aoshi and the
girl that like him (but I can't remember her name), Xellos, Vega from El Hazard, the Jaws and Baka mascots, Kenshin Extra #240, and Asuka from Evangelion,
Miyazawa from Kare Kano, they also dragged a person in Calling him the Expendable Ninja Guy . There in the Cosplay room they were made to do improv,
for prizes and for fun to give the audience a laugh, it was a very enjoyable experience and hope to bring it to Otafest next year.
During the festival I got into a verbal tiff between an Animathon/ Baka Staffer between which Club was better, BAKA the club for Idiots which Baka mean in
Japanese not the Banzai Anime Klub of Alberta, or the DOA, the better of the two who are "Dedicated" to Anime and all things Japanese. We are the
"Dedicated Otaku Anime Club." We argued about the art work that was done for the guidebook compared to Otafest, the t-shirts, club demographics and
various other things, Thanks goes to Andy, the guy that I argued with.. and I really think that the Animathon t-shirts are plagiarizing anime characters from
different anime, and original artwork should be used, although the quality was a lot better than that of Otafest but the price was more, being $20 for the shirt,
and Andy was trying to get every body to buy a shirt, (over kill on the advertisement).
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