AFA 09 (not so) Quick Cover

Whew! Ok, just gonna quickly pen a post on AFA (that’s Anime Festival Asia) 09 before my memories of it dim any further. Much of it is what you’d expect of an anime con, and I’ll let my shoddy photos near the end do the talking for those, but before we hit that, let me first dedicate a couple of paragraphs to the live dubbing session(s!). It was after all the first time in my little life that I beheld seiyuus working their craft at such close proximity ;)

Quite luckily for me there were TWO live dubbing sessions on the day I went down to Suntec for the con(!!) The first and most anticipated, of course, was the K-ON session. And let me get this straight: dubbing here isn’t in the sense of having someone random (or english dubbers) speak the lines. We’re talking the actual voice actresses that we hear on TV here, flown all the way down from Japan to redo a couple of scenes from the show – live in front of an audience. And they actually managed to bring down nearly all of the K-ON girls! (with Mio’s seiyuu conspicuously missing)

Was pretty cool! Expectedly they were a jumpy and giggly bunch. After a brief introduction they jumped straight into the dubbing, understandably picking out short scenes that didn’t have Mio-lines, and they were good! If it weren’t for the mic echoes I could barely tell the difference from the original show. It’s been some time since I watched K-ON, so the scenes sure invoked some happy memories. They even paid tribute to the graet caek! In the end, though, it was only a number of short (~2 minute?) snippets, out of which I think Yui’s seiyuu had the most fun (She spoke in Yui-mode literally throughout the thing). A Q&A session followed – predictably uninteresting with run-off-the-mill questions in the spirit of “Do you think you are similar to the character you play?” (Oh come on!) – until some enlightened soul from Japan had the good sense to ask “What are your favourite lines from the show?”.

W00t! Interesting answers at last!

The seiyuus warmed up to it immediately and after the token “Oh, I love all the lines BUT -“, each let a line fly live on stage. Yui did this – yes, including physical actions. And Ritsu, who was shorter than the rest and surprisingly quiet-ish despite her role in the anime, burst out a “ANO TOKI NO YAKUSOKU WA USO DATTANOKA!!” (“So the promise that we made that time was just a lie!?” think ep 1-2ish when they were trying to get people into the club). Tsumugi rolled out her epic bargaining skills (remember the subservient guitar shop?), and then Azunyan came up and said her favourite line was nya~. NYA~! If I had my old blog post on K-ON moe I’d link to it to remind you of the awesome of that scene, but only the screenshot still lives today, so it’ll have to do.

N..nya~

Damn, now I have a big urge to rewatch K-ON (and keep a keen eye out this time for all the Mugi-goggling ;) )

The second one was a much less played up appearance of a pair of seiyuus of Weiss Survive, which appears to be a card game turned anime kind of thing. The president of Bushiroad Inc (which sells the cards) was also a guest.

Despite not knowing anything about the anime, the card game, or Bushiroad, this turned out to be surprisingly entertaining. The president guy was a very interesting character who took upon himself to announce, in passable english, his great love for his card game, his grand ambitions for his company, and how lousy one of the seiyuus was in the game (“He”, pronounced the president, pointing to the poor guy, “is WEAK“). And when his seiyuus proceeded to the mic stands for the live dubbing, he walked over too, responding, when his intentions were questioned by the MC, “Special sanka (participation) desu!“. The dubbing was less flawless than the K-ON one, mainly because unlike the K-ON session, they didn’t have recordings of the scenes with the voices cut out (so we were hearing double-voices here and there), but it was still pretty cool, and the president guy gamely did a pretty good job of voicing a weird, eccentric old man in one of the scenes. Overall the session felt a lot more ‘unwired’ than the carefully controlled K-ON session, with plenty of fun and jabbing between the three participants. Was glad I hung around :)

Okay! That was a lot more stuff than I thought I’d write. Guess its not such a ‘quick’ cover anymore :) Anyway, for the rest of the con, I’ll just do a photo spam with quick-captions and occasional descriptions for the more interesting bits. Here we go~

Ranka and Sheryl

Predictably, K-ON cosplays were in no short supply

This lady appeared to have learned of and assimilated Haruhi’s secret strategy for flyer distribution

That’s some pretty impressive wings

Cosplay quality was pretty up to par, but I didn’t take many pics since my camera (and my photographic skills) are depressingly shoddy :(

There were also a couple of rather interesting booths.

This one was selling katana, fashioned in the likeness of Bleach Zanpakuto’s, among others

There were also special booths for anisong karaoke and what appeared to be anime scene dubbing

Then there is the much hyped “Moe Moe Kyun” Maid Cafe (and queue!) I hear the price of maid ogling is consuming average food for jaw-dropping amounts of moolah

Danny Choo’s show was the previous day, but he was still hanging around, co-hosting the K-ON live dubbing session, posing with cosplayers, and blessing his groupie horde with his blessed countenance

And what’s an Anime Con without Patung Lucah!
(‘Obscene dolls’, it’s a Malaysian Otaku joke ;) )

Sweet Saber, too bad I only had a phone-camera that was pretty below-par

And finally, a few more words on the ‘I love AniSong’ concert with May’n and Fukuyama, adding on to the impressions (read fanboy-ing) post here. Anyway, learning from last year’s mistakes, the AFA guys did a much better job with the concert this year. Completely curtaining off a slice of the entire hall for the stage-area was a great idea, both in terms of making it easier to manage the crowd, and also in terms of creating a much better concert ambience (the place was actually dark, accentuating the stage lights that were rather inadequate last year). The sound systems, while not yet perfect, is also much improved. All these considered, plus the fact that they managed to double the number of ‘celebrity’ live performers this year, make this year’s concert a definite step-up from last year’s. Kudos to the organisers ;)

On a semi-related note, May’n ended her performance with a ‘See you again next year!’, does that mean she’s gonna be at AFA yet again? :P Not that I’m complaining, but there’re only so many Macross songs, and those are the ones that we’re truly interested in (even if her album songs were no shoddy material). If AFA does again feature May’n in concert next year, here’s hoping that they’d also beam over Megumi Nakajima (of Ranka fame) for some awesome dueting. That’ll be some real value-add :)