From news.utdallas.edu!news01.aud.alcatel.com!gatech!howland.reston.ans.net!ix.netcom.com!netcom.com!zizi Tue Nov 21 20:21:24 1995 Newsgroups: rec.arts.anime Path: news.utdallas.edu!news01.aud.alcatel.com!gatech!howland.reston.ans.net!ix.netcom.com!netcom.com!zizi From: zizi@netcom.com (Elizabeth HL Horn) Subject: Carl's Chunk-Style Review of OTAKON 1995 Message-ID: Organization: NETCOM On-line Communication Services (408 261-4700 guest) Date: Tue, 21 Nov 1995 09:12:39 GMT Lines: 459 Sender: zizi@netcom12.netcom.com I wasn't able to make it to AnimEast, so here's this review instead. It's a little late... -------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Now we got white kids callin' themselves 'nigga'..." --KRS-One, "MCs Act Like They Don't Know" "Art is a wicked thing. It is what we are." --Georgia O' Keeffe OTAKON 1995 was a surrealistic hermitage, a perfect bubble of otakudom suspended in an endless sea of cow shit. It was in many ways the most amazing anime convention I've ever attended. I had no intention to go there when I espied their table at Anime America--this despite the fact that they had the coolest flyers, the coolest T-shirts, and the artist of the aforementioned flyers and T-shirts, Robert DeJesus, right there at the table, working on an interesting drawing involving Minnie May, Rally Vincent, and a toilet plunger. Lame as it sounds, my schedule just wouldn't admit to it; now that I think about it, I had only been to conventions in states where I had a home (i.e., California y Texas). Supposedly, no one knows how Otakon got mentioned in Brutus, the Japanese men's magazine. But that's where Toshio Okada heard about it, and I gather he was intrigued by a convention that would have the balls to name itself that (there are people who never miss an afureco and yet still wouldn't call themselves "otaku"). So he decided to come to it with intentions he would reveal when he arrived. I have very few living heroes. Mr. Okada didn't spend twenty-seven years in prison and then emerge to become the first president of a new democracy like Nelson Mandela, or get his leg blown off by the Viet Cong yet be the only senator to speak out against the flag-burning amendment like Bob Kerrey, but he is one of them just the same. Rather, Toshio Okada was the founder and first president of a new kind of anime studio; a studio of the fans, a mysterious, chaotic combine of unprecedented skill and undreamed-of talent, called Gainax, that would create the film that gave anime its promotion to adulthood, "The Wings of Honneamise." During my college years, it was "Honneamise" this, "Honneamise" that," 7 and 9.30 Monday in the Fishbowl, 7 and 9.30 Tuesday in Mudd-Blaisdell Lounge. Fire code? Suck in your gut. Flyers on campus in 40-pt. Helvetica like I thought it was the greatest film ever made. I never bought the CD because I already had all the LPs from Books ("Well, there were shipping costs! Union dues! Plus, we had to maintain our outrageous savings rate!") Nippan. Blah blah blah "Honneamise." But Gainax? I knew they had made it, but that was about all. I hadn't seen Gunbuster; in fact, I even had a vague resentment towards it because I sensed it was made in reaction to the commercial failure of "Honneamise" (which, as Okada would later mention, was true). I didn't go after Nadia. I had no effing inkling of what General Products, USA was. I knew it existed, but it never clicked in my mind what it did or that Gainax was connected with it. Now I can look at Gaver-san's beautiful GP catalog from my innocent sophomore year at Pomona, and see all of those beautiful "Honneamise" garage kits, and say that beautiful word fuck. Sic transit gloria GP. An otaku's lament for lost youth. If I had gone to AnimeCon '91, I might have known. But my Mazda went all Mishima on me on the bridge of the Gila River, writing the kanji for "cylinder ring" in white smoke high above Interstate 10. I got myself hauled to the nearest facsimile of civilization, Chandler, an outgrowth of MetroPhoenix so new that only the broad boulevards were there as yet--only in the inner eye of dreams could you see the self-storage facilities that would someday rise from the desert sands. I spent AnimeCon '91 watching Bill Moyers explain the origins of "Amazing Grace" and forging a tan under the great sky hammer. So it wasn't a total loss (the Chandler Motel 8 also had complimentary iced tea--try getting that at the Red Lion). But I wasn't the only one who couldn't make it to the convention--Toshio Okada was supposed to be there. He was one of the principal people who had set it up, after all. But he had neglected to tell his wife about his plans for a little jaunte to America, and his wife was, if ya didn't know, the model and namesake for Kazumi Amano (that's her maiden name) in "Aim For The Top!". So he didn't go. It occurred to me, recently, that the history of anime fans in America might have been rather different if he had. The summer of 1991 was high tide for Gainax--they had at last found popular as well as "otaku" success with "Nadia of the Mysterious Seas," the TV anime hit of the year. "The Royal Space Force"--that's Gainax's name for it--had won the Animage Editors' Award in 1987, but "Nadia" won Animage's Grand Prix, the prize based on readers' votes (in 1987 they had voted the Grand Prix to "Zillion"). And a company calling itself "Grand Prix" was about to crown themselves Otakings...come out and actually proclaim themselves otaku...in a secret OAV project undertaken by Gainax in the summer of '91. Nothing could stop them...and had their president, Okada, come to the U.S. then, to the grand gathering of his foreign brothers, who knows what bridge might have been laid down? (Begin singing "Arise, ye wretched of the earth" here). (We haven't even gotten to Otakon yet, you'll notice) I wish I could have gotten to Otakon earlier than I did--because, frankly, if you're not inside the first two hours of any dealers' room, y'all can forget about scoopin' any copies of Chosen Ame, the world's greatest doujinshi--or any doujinshi of those ravissement recherche', sauvage savante, it seems. I'm lucky enough to live in the Bay Area, so getting ordinary anime goods isn't a problem--it's the out-of-the-ordinary I watch for at them cons. I didn't make it on time because of my own scheduling, and I thought I might squirm onto the Thurday nite red-eye, but instead I squirmed onto the early-Friday morning airport lounge seating for one of those six hours of sleep in fifteen-minute portions that make you feel like you're just going to give in and sign the confession of bombing North Vitenamese hospitals. There was one field trip though, during that time, that made the whole experience interesting, and it confirmed why SFO is my favorite airport in the world. Not only is their foreign exchange (B of A) very reasonable, but they're always mounting these cool, offbeat exhibits. There are at least four display areas in the airport which have shown everything from Babylonian carvings to ukelele collections (that was much more interesting than it sounds). But this time, the display cases nearest to my pied a aire had this guy's collection of Japanese robot toys from the 30s to the 60s, all made out of tin, the way God intended them to be. We're talking two-foot-tall ambulatory, spark-spittin mecha made out of an element known to the ancients. There should be a tin Giant Robo, y'know? Surely this was a good omen for a convention dedicated to otaku. That, and the entrails of some pigeon run over by a Smarte Carte looked very favorable. Let's skip ahead to Pittsburgh, whom I always liked as a kid because Houston can't love Dallas too much, not even the Cowboys, and the Steelers were the only real threat to Dallas during those Metternich NFL days of the Carter administration. State College, PA's airport is too small to handle jet aircraft without arresting hooks, so you transfer to this funky twin-prop where the safety lecture doesn't bother to include "place your mask on before assisting others"--because there aren't any masks; the plane can't fly high enough where you would need them. No, we flew in low to Penn State--and looking out the window, the lower cruising altitude brought you right back to the World War II era. You weren't so high that you couldn't pick out tank formations or maybe eighty-eight emplacements (Much of Pennsylvania looks the table-top of a war game; no doubt part of the reason that the largest land battle ever in the Western Hemisphere was fought here once). Touching down, there was no immediately obvious way to get to the convention center, the Scanticon. Fortunately, a vet working for Century 21 was kind enough to give me a lift. It's only a few miles, but they're a few miles through forests thick and dark as a loaf of pumpernickel and scattered farms which look like their inhabitants would be named Esau or Aaron. Then you run into Penn State--or rather, Penn State's stadium. Although some of its graduate programs rank among the best in the nation, I must admit that a shadow of primitive terror coursed through me at the sight of this million-seat behemoth arising from the corn, for it looked as if the mothership had indeed landed in the heartland and I, for one, was ready to lead them to Harlock in exchange for an extra ration book. But I relaxed as I realized this represented not horrors from beyond the sky, but rather, good old-fashioned American open-handedness; Penn State's alumni are well-known for their generosity and the construction about campus (and for that matter, the Scanticon), is part of a long-term plan to build the University's facilities and reputation to ever greater heights. I was a little confused at my first sight of the Scanticon, though. It *is* what Otakon's publicity promised--a convention center with modern facilities, nice rooms, courteous staff, tasteful decor and AT&T Public Phones 2000--but that's all on the *inside.* On the outside, the Scanticon looks like a sinister brick high school. I stepped a little dubiously inside (and I was not to leave the building again until Monday morning except to smoke out with Rich Anderson) and started wandering around, looking for reg. I turned left, not knowing I should have turned right, and asked the first guy I ran into for directions--it was a Japanese guy, big as the sun. "Convention registration? Ah, it's down there." Now, on one level of my circuit-breaking mind, I realized that this was the very man for whom I'd made this trip in the first place, but that was only halfway through his sentence and I waited until he finished before shaking his hand and saying, "Oh my gosh, are you Mr. Okada?" He looked me in the eye and agreed that he was, although his gaze held a bit of that "You Cal-Animage types really piss me off!" But as far as I was concerned, this was *really* getting the convention off to a good start. So I made my way to the reg desk and started slapping up flyers for "Neon Genesis Evangelion" on one of the handy kiosks the con people had erected (huh-huh), and began to hook up with what, were "Otaku no Video" directed by Quentin Tarantino, would be my "niggas," Rich, Ryan, Maria, Neil, Dave (it is really too bad Dani-chan and my main Mitsuru--or is it my Shinobu?--John Kim, couldn't make it). Since there was only one real problem with Otakon (the food budget for the Con Suite and Green Room), let me balance it out immediately with a good point: * The chairs in the event rooms were revolutionary. None of those Nuremberg Rally-lockstepped rigid rows of seating extending to the vanishing point of perspective such as you find at West coast ubercons, but big, blue, executive style cloth-covered chairs with *neckrests* and *armrests* that you could *move around.* So you could customize the audience geometry of every panel. OK, some more good points: * Part of the "convention environment" is the way the con symbolically marks out its territory (the hotel) for the duration of the event, and Otakon did this better than any anime con I've ever seen. Not only were the numerous kiosks festooned with cool stuff like propaganda for the future Anime Central convention--Chicago's first ("And these embers never fade/In the city by the lake"), but Otakon made wonderful use of the hotel monitors with their programmed messages about con guests and ongoing events, using really sharp anime graphics and titles. Otakon even went so far as to commandeer the PA system, so that the strains of Sharon Apple, who just makes me feel...really happy...drifted down from the speakers. You really felt like you were on liberated ground, Sproul Hall 1964, back when such things were actually kind of entertaining. * The convention had these cool life-sized cut-outs of Bean Bandit, Lum, and Ranma-chan positioned around. Rich made a pose with this last one that looked a bit suggestive, if you asked me. But unlike myself, he's actually capable of drawing something besides himself, so he's entitled to certain liberties. * Toren Smith and Tomoko Saito. Mr. Okada asked me at one point whom I considered the American "Otaking" to be, and I wonder if Toren isn't a good candidate for the title. He was down with Gainax from day one, ascending to the supreme honor of being made Noriko Takaya's love interest and then being blown to screaming atoms by the benevolent main writer of AIM FOR THE TOP!, Okada-san. In 1988, when I was still trying to scrape together a fansub of ""Honneamise"", Toren was helping Okada schlep 16mm reels of the film around Hollywood, hoping to find someone who would support an American re-dub and re-release of Gainax's masterpiece (that's a story in itself). Toren's probably done more than any single individual to promote the modern age of translated manga in the United States, through his seminal Studio Proteus. And he is a man of practical and unfailing courage, despising censorship viscerally, when it comes to bringing across the unrestrained, decadent, even savage, side of the art form--if he's thwarted at one stead, he'll go around it and continue forward another way. Tomoko Saito, Toren's wife, is a manga artist of such caliber that Hiroyuki Utatane himself draws tributes to her. She fills her pages with drawings of Rob Zombie and Trent Reznor and super-deformed Glenn Danzigs and Matthew Sweets. You're familiar with her great screentone and touch-up work that has enhanced former Studio Proteus efforts like "A Plague of Angels" and current ones such as "Gun Smith Cats." And she was a great translator for Okada (which mainly helped speed things up a little, as Okada's English is fairly good--more on that later). * Robert DeJesus, America's Favorite Fan Anime Artist (tm), who is also an ascended master (I first met him at The Bamboo House at AX '93. He had found the Old Milwaukee and was as suspicious as everyone else of the Snyder's Honey Mustard Pretzels, which always come out of the bag looking like they've been pounded with a drop press: "Didn't you do the Protoculture Addicts '"Honneamise"' cover?" "Yes" "That's cool, that was for my article." "I'm glad you liked it--what's this Perot flyer for?"). He ascended right into the vaunted pages of Chosen Ame, and yet had no copies to sell, so I had to settle for examining another interesting drawing he was working on--this one involved Megumi, Skuld, and her debugging mallet. * Dave Fleming, who is one of those fans whom, together with the people of the Poro x 2 Project, I owe more than I can really say--but I'll try to say it anyway. Like Sue Shambaugh, and later, Neil Nadelman would for THE WINGS OF ""Honneamise"", these people unlocked great films for the anime fans of the English-speaking world. When I saw ONLY YESTERDAY at A-Kon, I cried ("Did I mention that when you hit me..."). When I watched the first PATLABOR movie at Owlcon XIV, and the second at Cal-Animage, I stood dumbstruck. Both emotions were from an appreciation of the enormous potential of anime as shown in those films; a power so great, that in discussing it, you begin to sound like bad AKIRA dialogue. But that appreciation could never have been made without those fans' work...In "Corduroy," Eddie Vedder sings, "Can't buy what I want because it's free"--you *can't* buy Dave's translations for PATLABOR. That's the problem. * Pockyman! Naturally. Someone was speculating that, considering the amount of good karma he's built up, can't he get his pick of reincarnations for the next life? Something strange seemed to have happened to the choco-Pocky left overnight in the Green Room, so I sought him out for an explanation. "Oh, that's the way they're supposed to look," he said. This was my introduction to Almond Pocky. What I thought had been some weird form of gluten decay was merely a new flavor. * The program book, which had perhaps the sharpest interiors of any I've ever seen. Wonderful illustration choices, and a vibrant use of the text-over-pictures layout style I love. * The video programming, which not only displayed incredible diversity--"Miracle Girls" to "End of Summer," giving fan-parodies equal billing (some deserve it!) but a sense of culture not often associated with otaku. Other cons have mixed in Hong Kong films with the anime, as did Otakon. But Otakon also went in for Japanese live-action films, and not just any--gems like "In the Realm of the Senses" (which Robert Woodhead said he was going to out of his way to catch) and "Black Lizard"--tres hip! A very entertaining and interesting schedule over all, and I want to go out of my way to note that. Let's take a break for a moment from talking about the many good things of Otakon and discuss Toshio Okada, whom I saw again during the panel on Gainax Friday afternoon. For some reason, Steve Pearl and I were sitting on it and we opened by discussing how we had become otaku. Then Okada laid in... A word about Toshio Okada. He is probably the most outgoing of any GOH who has ever attended an anime convention. Many GOHs are there to make a token appearance, keep the (scary, probably crack-addicted) American fans at arm's length, and make a quick left for Disneyland. And as I've said before, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Why? Because the GOHs have already done us fans the favor--that is, they actually labored and used their creative talent to make the anime and manga we enjoy. They *don't* owe us anything else besides, so if they just want to wave from behind a panel, that's more than OK in my view. GOHs can be shy, too, after all. But when a GOH actually wants to reach out, that's a special kind of bonus. And more than one is this way, The odd thing I've noticed is that the more "otaku" a guest is (Ken'ichi Sonoda, Hideaki Anno, the Comic Market contingent) the more they seem willing to reach out. And the most outgoing of all is Toshio Okada--they don't come any more otaku than he, and he posesses a special bonus: speaking English, something I did not know he could. I should have guessed, however. I now understand that he had the best English among Gainax's principal crew--which, of course, meant that in 1987 when the first dub of "Honneamise", "Star Quest," premiered, he had the fewest defenses against it; according to Toren Smith, while the other members of Gainax did realize that something was very, very wrong, they were helped in this perception by Okada, who kept sinking lower and lower into his seat during the evening. How he developed his aptitude I don't know (he claimed to have gone to college only so he could join a SF club), and Tomoko Saito said that Okada hadn't had any occasion to use his English for the past several years. Nevertheless he rose to the occasion at the convention; although he isn't quite fluent, you can certainly carry on a conversation with him without an interpreter if you're willing to rephrase words he might not know every so often. I couldn't help but wonder whether there might be other GOHs who have Okada's level of English proficency, but are too shy to try it out. If there's one thing Okada isn't, it's shy. Well, you've all seen "Otaku no Video". Okada looks exactly like his alter ego Tanaka, except he was never seen with glasses on. He is wide, and fairly tall for a native-born Japanese. I can see how his size would in fact contribute to his charisma. It was a charisma that was certainly communicated to the attendees at Otakon. For Okada's concern in coming there in the first place was simply this: the American fans. He wanted to know what we are like, at what level of development we are as otaku. We all understood the challenge he represented; "my favorite things are change and challenge" was a quote of his--a guy who started out as a hardcore SF and anime fan, who began to make eight-millimetre movies in 1981, began a anime-merchandise empire, talked Bandai into giving him the largest budget in anime history in 1985, produced one of the genre's most acclaimed films in 1987, and went on to make a hit OAV series, a monster TV show, a revolutionary new type of computer game. Today he teaches at Japan's top university--and he is *still* a hardcore SF and anime fan. The message--and sometimes it was more explicit than implicit--was, what have *we* accomplished lately? Neil would agree with me that our hour-long discussion with Okada was one of the more profound experiences of our otaku careers. You have to realize that the two biggest fans of "Honneamise" in the English-speaking world were suddenly talking with the man who had made the film possible. The readers of rec.arts.anime, like many English-speaking anime fans, also hold the film in high regard. Yet Gainax has not spoken about it to any Western press since 1987. It's as if we were put down in front of the TV set showing "Honneamise" eight years ago and our parents left; now, they've suddenly returned...and we've grown up to be our own people, without ever really knowing about our parents. Like T.S. Eliot's Magi, having traveled far to this little town to greet this extraordinary personage, Neil and I found ourselves no longer at ease as Okada expressed regrets about the film's lack of mainstream appeal one moment--but the next moment saying ,"I can't understand *why* they can't understand." He would call the script weak, but then suddenly maintain, "We made a great film." His remarks about Gainax, the company he left in 1992, were just as provocative, and redoubled my interest in getting the viewpoints of the man who wrote and directed "Honneamise" as well as succeeded Okada as president--Hiroyuki Yamaga, as well as those of the other creative people at Gainax. In all, our interview with Okada ran to about 9,000 words (twice the length of this post), and it will appear early next year in four installments in Animerica. I think you'll find it quite interesting. Saturday night, Rich and I smoked out...outside, that is--the only time I emerged during the entire con. State College, PA reminds me of one of those towns in a low-budget science-fiction movie, that, because it's out of the way, survived the nuclear war or the plague or whatever. The populace, with the remnants of Man's wisdom retained in the University library (remember that the major cities are in ashes) are trying to maintain an outpost of civilization. But you know that by the fourth reel, a marauding gang of bikers is going to roll into town, looking to loot, rape, and destroy. The students--with the help of makeshift munitions provided by the science and engineering faculty--are going to somehow drill themselves into a rag-tag millitia capable of preserving humanity's last hope from these post-apocalyptic Vikings. Anyway, as Radman and I inhaled the burning weed, I couldn't help but notice his sharp attire and coy ponytail. In fact, as Beavis would say (it is frightening how natural the voices of B&B seem for otaku), "he looks like he's in some cool band." Since when did the Midwest start to produce such pretty-boy fans? Ryan was my pick for "most GQ" last year, but Rich is desfinitely giving his fresh-faced openness a run for its money. Now, Ryan is a real apostle of Corn Pone Flicks, same as me, and he loves to show off their stuff in boss room parties to which I really should make a donation to their liquor budget. But Otakon's the kind of con where we just had to invite Robert Woodhead in to see CPF's "B.A.D. III" (their third have-a-spare-ass-ready-to-replace-the- one-you'll-laugh-off collection of Bad American Dubbing) with us. So he lay on the shag before the screen and laughed with relief after being assured there was no AnimEigo material within (that's in "B.A.D. IV"). As Toshio Okada himself noted, Mr. Woodhead is a true otaku when all is said and done--who else would make a "Bubble Gum Crisis" shower curtain ("For Soapy Fun!"). *Hey*--if you haven't done so yet, place your advance order with AnimEigo for the "Otaku no Video" LD. They can't press them until they get a minimum number of orders. Send AnimEigo your advance order (their e-mail address is 72477.37@compuserve.com) together with your Visa or MasterCard number. C'mon, it's been too long--ONV should really be on LD! And if you've heard that Okada himself put in an advance order, that's absolutely true--and strictly speaking, he doesn't need a subtitled version! So *you* don't have any excuse. If you don't know about ONV, it's sometimes called "the Spinal Tap of anime"--a 100-min. long half-animated, half live-action story of a thinly-disguised Gainax's rise from doujinshi-hawkers to Fortune 500 company! Featuring character designs by Ken'ichi Sonoda ("Bubble Gum Crisis," "Riding Bean," "Gun Smith Cats," etc.), Super Idol Misty May (who makes two dimensions seem like three or four), and it even transforms into a big robot! ONV is a scathingly honest statement about being an anime fan that only Gainax would dare make, and making it was almost the end of their career as an anime studio. Don't miss the opportunity to own it if you're an anime fan yourself. Late, maybe Sunday night, a strange thing happened, where the crew and I sat down and watched the American fan-parody dub of ONV, "Fanboy Generation X" (Seishun Shitemasu have also dubbed this, but only one scene--and seriously!--for Planet Otaku no Video '94). Actually, "FGX" is not so much a "parody" of ONV but a "transposition," setting it in Peoria, Illinois instead of Tokyo, and savaging American otaku instead of Japanese. The OTAKON 1995 Program Book put it best: "Cynical and bitter, this is the burnout case's view of American fandom. From ROBOTECH geeks, to con slugs, to embittered old veteran club officers...this is an ocean of vinegar to dissolve even the most optimistic of mountains!" I might have called it "The Downward Spiral" of fan-parodies ("I am the hate you keep inside/Mr. Self Destruct!") but you get the idea. And enjoying it with the very Midwesterners who produced it just added to the effect. But, as the Good Book says, "heaviness may endureth for a night, but joy cometh in the morning," and indeed on Monday A.M., the morning of my twenty-fifth interview, Mr. Okada stopped me (while the Scanticon staff held the airport van) to interview *me*! "Where were you born?" "What's your favorite anime *besides* 'Honneamise'?" "Did you lose all your friends when you became an otaku?" He had been asking a number of people at the con such questions--as I may have said, he was there to see *us*...but that didn't make it any less special a birthday president. The Otaking, who was the first person I saw at the convention, was the person who said goodbye as I went out the door. How am I going to argue with a con like that? --Carl "I just thought that might be your name" Horn