Ogling Tomatsu at AFA 12 – Sunday’s Live Dubbing and Concert

So I went to AFA again this year! Buying the whole (non-VIP) package for Sunday including Stage Events and Concert. Sunday because while Lisa and co. on Saturday’s concert lineup looked plenty attractive, their shine was tarnished somewhat by Baby Metal also being on the same day (I’m sorry, it’s probably not such a nice thing to say, but Baby Metal is kill-it-with-fire material for me personally). At the end of it all Sunday turned out to be a great choice since Sphere ended up doing a live dubbing event in the afternoon which was pretty awesome. All in all it was a very packed, and very eventful day – eventful partly because my pants ripped (!) in the middle of the thing and I had to hightail to the nearby mall to buy emergency replacements. Running between the stage events and getting pants had the unfortunate consequence of me failing in the end to meet up with Iso in what would have been my first ever irl meetup with a fellow aniblogger, but hey, the day may not have been perfect in a couple of ways, but all in all I sure as hell had a phenomenal time.

So I’m gonna focus on the highlights of the day here. To be honest I didn’t get too much free-roaming time around the con area and just did a single round, so I didn’t get to see too too much in the way of cosplay. The highlights were worth it though. The first big highlight was of course the Sphere live-dubbing session. I managed to get to the venue in time for the concert performers’ brief fan greeting session, after which the Sphere girls stayed back to be proxy-interviewed by Danny Choo and his co-host (not sure who she was). Proxy, of course, because the questions were all fan-mailed. Sorta standard fare, I guess.

The throngs at the greeting and live dubbing session

I’d probably have been pretty amused by how they grandly proclaimed themselves “SUU-hiar!” (emphasis capitalized), if I weren’t too busy blinking away stardust. As some of you might know I’m a little bit of a Haruka Tomatsu fan, so it was pretty exciting being in the audience and watching and hearing her from within like 10 meters away. The questions were for the most part pretty standard fare: asking for their thoughts on Singapore, about characters they feel they are most similar to, that kind of thing. Apparently their strongest impression of Singapore is of the Merlion. I wagered my friend that they’d follow the tradition set by their compatriots who had previously come down to AFA and also eat chicken rice and durian – and boy was I spot on. They also apparently tried other stuff like Kuih Lapis and Goreng Pisang – snack sort of food. Unsurprisingly, aside from a word or two thrown out here and there, they couldn’t really speak english. Somehow Ayahi Takagaki kept confusing the word “difficult” with “different”. In a cute moment she solemnly mused “hmmmm…. different” when it was her turn to answer “What character do you have the most confidence in?”, prompting the others to quickly correct her (she obviously meant to say “difficult”, as in the question was difficult to answer). In the ensuing flurry of hilarity and embarrassment, Minako Kotobuki, who being from Kansai had previously expressed confidence in her Kansai-ben abilities, turned around and dramatically dropped her a “Nande ya nen!“. While that bit of gold would probably have been lost on people who couldn’t understand Japanese at all, interestingly enough when Danny Choo asked for a show of hands from people who could understand Japanese – there were a LOT of hands. I guess it’s a requisite skill for Seiyuu fans since most of the Seiyuu’s out-of-role antics go untranslated. Probably the answer that made the most impact on me was Aki Toyosaki’s reply to “What got you into being a Seiyuu”. Apparently she never used to like her voice, but then while she was on a media-related part time job she received a note from a listener saying her voice had helped bring cheer, and that’s what got her thinking about using her voice to reach out to people. It was a nice little anecdote. To be honest, I never really liked her voice either… but I feel a little bad about it now :)

Next came the live dubbing! For the uninitiated this is where they wind through selected scenes from an anime with the voices removed, so the Seiyuu could dub over the scenes live. Unsurprisingly, they chose scenes from Natsuiro Kiseki (you might remember a certain post here), since the four main girls in the show were played by the four of them. What can I say, veteran seiyuus are pretty damn good at what they do. The first scene they did was in the second arc where Natsumi and Saki went to Rinko’s shrine to confront Yuka and Rinko after they got glued together thanks to Yuka and Rinko’s wish. They did a good few minutes of it including the chase scenes where they all did convincing impressions of panting and huff-puffing. Impressive stuff. The whole thing was just spot on, it’s like they’re all tape recorders or something that can be made to playback their voices with all the full range of necessary emotive intonations and at the right tempo and rhythm – just like that. If you couldn’t hear the mic echoes you probably wouldn’t be able to tell that it was live-dubbed. Also, I gotta say, while Toyosaki probably has the most unique voice during normal speech (she basically sounds exactly like Yui, the K-ON one), Tomatsu has this really nice ringing and musical high-pitched voice when she’s working with characters like Yuka. I remember first taking notice of her precisely from liking her similar-styled work with To Love Ru’s Lala. Her performance was in the end largely responsible for how deep I got into that terrible, terrible first season before finally giving up. Good times. Anyway, the next scene they did was the one where Rinko got Saki and Natsumi together in order to secretly wish for the recovery of Yuka, who had been down with a cold – only to have Yuka walk in on them having already fully recovered. It was more of the same good stuff, with special props going to Toyosaki for her utterly convincing sobs when Rinko tearfully embraced Yuka. In fact I wondered if she had actually spontaneously started crying, but I was unfortunately located at an angle where her script was directly in the way of her face in my vision, so I guess that’ll remain a mystery.

The “Mado-car”, as my friend happily christened it

After the session I had just enough time to get my pants, grab a bite, and make a full round around the con area (do a depth-first search, as we programmers jokingly call it), before it was concert time! And boy, was the stage venue this year legit! It was like a real concert hall, in contrast with the stages of previous years which looked like they were temporarily put together. After entering and sitting down I found I didn’t feel all that bad about spending more money to attend the concert this year, after all.

The legit concert stage

Anyway, unlike last year there was no emceeing at all in this year’s concert, and so Hachioji P‘s opening performance just kind of started out of nowhere, confusing those of us unfamiliar with his music for a good while. When we finally figured out that yes, the concert has in fact started and that Hachioji P was the DJ playing us his works, I listened in with interest. My impressions were rather mixed. On one hand much of his work just isn’t the sort of stuff I enjoy genre-wise (very electronic, disco-ish music with techno beats, sung by DJ-distorted Miku voices), on the other hand some of the songs had very interesting moods and lyrics. The accompanying videos were pretty nice too. The two big screens on the stage played the accompanying animation videos as the man himself stood center stage with his turntable, resplendent in his showmanship. When he was done he said goodbye, and again without any word the stagelights faded and we transitioned into intermission.

The locally-formed SeaA girls were up next, and though they put on a spirited performance, they expectedly fell short of the maturity of the other performers of the night. I’m pretty sure they lip-synced one or two songs. In addition to their own songs, they also performed english translated covers (yes, english translated) of the old Digimon OP “Butterfly” and the iconic “God knows”, and well – interesting an idea as it was – I feel like the choice of songs isn’t very inspired here. When it comes down to it SeaA belongs in my opinion to the category of artists who generate appeal by projecting camaraderie via the harmony of their voices (the same category Sphere belongs to, for example). Butterfly and God Knows just aren’t songs that are well brought out by this style. I’m also a little afraid of knowing the detailed translated lyrics, to be honest :) so I didn’t try very hard to hear the words. In the end I liked their last song of the night the most: their debut song: ‘Dream Shooter’. Now that imo is exactly the type of song they should be working on more.

Minami Kuribayashi was up next after another abrupt light-up and light-down, and the most immediate impression I got hearing her burst into song amidst the dancing light, was that man, this was the real deal. さすが本物はちがう. As tends to be the case with me in events like these, I didn’t know a single song she sang ^^; Think she did numbers from shows like Total Eclipse, Mai-Hime, and a few others. Kuribayashi had this very interesting “my pace” sort of personality on stage – she went about her way between songs smiling and greeting and talking in this distinctly unflustered and unhurried fashion. She also wore a gown that revealed most of her back, smilingly noting something to the effect that it was to live up to the enthusiasm of the fans. Some folks got a “turn around!” chant going and she unhurriedly did this graceful perfect spin on stage. It was all pretty funny and cute. As for her singing, it was awesome. There is a certain degree of magic to hearing these things performed live. You hear and feel the voices better and unlike the studio recording where everything is essentially flat and smooth the vocalist really has command, and you begin to really appreciate the level of the singer’s vocal abilities after hearing them go song after song in a successive chain and still hit all their notes and pitches with both feeling and unwavering control. We were all on our feet waving our light sticks in no time.

Then along came Sphere! And man, I remember my first thought being what the heck is up with their outfits x) They were all dressed in these weird ballad-ish dresses with blue tops and fluffy skirts that looked like little fuzzy blue clouds. Really not sure what’s up with that, but beyond the funky dress-up, we got lots more of their bright and high-energy style. Here at long last came the first songs I recognized. Funny story: the first song I happily started singing along to was “Happy Material”, and it turns out I don’t actually know the anime it was from. I knew the song because I bumped into a Hibiki cover and liked it, chucking it into my playlist with only a faint awareness that it was an anisong cover for some series or another. So I basically recognized Sphere’s cover of Happy Material from another cover that I’ve heard. Cool story bro? :O They also did a cover of an old Sailormoon song. They basically said that since they were there representing Japanese anisongs, they were gonna do anisongs exclusively, including covers of other anisongs rather than doing any of their non-anime related material. What can I say, I wish May’n would do us that favor sometimes :) (Also, watch the songs your Senpai picked to cover and take notes, SeaA!) I recall being impressed by the diverse effects of the stage lights watching their performance, since the four of them made perhaps the fullest use of the stage with their dancing and miming. I also remember the Natsuiro Kiseki OP “Non-stop road” being particularly impactful somehow – stirring and almost evocative. And really, in spite of the weird get up, they all had these radiant smiles and the overall image worked. …. Tomatsu was really cute >.< there I said it! orz It's totally not fair that you get to have a cute face on top of an attractive voice. She also introduced herself as "Haruka ToMAHts" - again emphasis capitalized. Not sure what was up with that, but it was.. cute. I'm gonna stop now before I say anything more embarassing D: And the final item of the night was fifth-time performer May’n, and all in all I was pretty blown away by her performance. Even coming after Kuribayashi, May’n’s (gah apostrophes) unbridled voice is really something special. That said, I remember being distinctly dissatisfied with the Northern Cross that she performed to open her segment, even though Northern Cross must be my favorite among all of her numbers. It was just different, especially from that first AFA live so many years ago, where she just let her voice go completely wild with the ridiculous number of ear-ripping high notes in the song. Her Northern Cross this year was… much more controlled, tamed even, with several smooth transitions into falsetto where she would a couple of years ago have just climbed the scales with sheer brute force. I guess it to some extent is a result of a maturing of style for her. Her showmanship in particular has really developed and matured over the years, and she’s really fitting into her buchou image with flair and flourish nowadays. However, I couldn’t help missing just a little the older days, when she was less certain and still developing, standing on the makeshift stage in the middle of the AFA con area with mics and sound systems that were hardly concert grade, and unleashing her distinct voice that was like a beautiful, untamable beast. Still, far be it from me to say that she isn’t better off where she is now, especially when she delivered Btooom!’s ballad-like ED that night with just heart-wrenching, breathtaking perfection. That ED was probably the only thing I liked about Btooom!, and listening to her performing it live that night was just magical. I still don’t really dig the electronic, fast-beat numbers that she seems to do a lot of nowadays, but you can’t argue with her talent. I just wish she’d have ended the night with one of her delightful Yoko Kano Frontier tracks rather than another of those high-octane dance ones. After she said goodbye, we all mounted an encore chant, but sadly, no one came back on.

Seats notwithstanding, I arrived home bone tired that day from all the jumping and waving that I did, and with my voice hoarse from all the yelling and cheering. But damn, was it all worth it :) Funnily, the only piece of loot I got was a pair of chopsticks:

I got curious about it and remembered that I wanted to by a pair of chopsticks anyway, so I happily grabbed a Haruhi themed one. It’s really nothing special, but hey, it’s something to bring home and fiddle around with at the end of the day. I’ll leave most of the looting to next week, where I’ll be heading down to Japan for a short visit. Watch this space for a possible blog post or two on that when the time comes :)