Today I ran away to the safety of the panels; Four days may be too much for Anime Expo, it's clear to me that they wish to compete at some level with San Diego Comic Con, but while the San Diego Convention Center and the surrounding area knows how to deal with Comic-Con traffic, Long Beach Convention Center and the area really has no idea how to deal with the flux of anime fans into the area. I hope that Anime Expo is never held again at Long Beach, though it's extremely close to my parents' house, and Long Beach is fairly neat, the convention center area sucks.
Today was kind of a panel day for me; Dark Horse, Geneon and Production I.G.
The Dark Horse Panel can be summed up pretty simply as "we didn't know what we were doing when we started with manga, and the things that we thought there wouldn't be a market for, people actually didn't mind." An example of this is the cultural references in Japanese manga, particularly Ah! My Goddess, where they removed all the minor cultural references to pop stars and current Japanese movies because they didn't think a Western audience would get it. Another example would be the manga-style books that TokyoPop publishes, where manga is read the traditional way, whereas Dark Horse used to flip the manga so that it would be read left-to-right as an american comic book would be. Now Dark Horse is going back and re-releasing Ah! My Goddess in the unflipped format and restoring the cultural references.
Geneon's panel can be summed up with "Licensing lots of new stuff. No high def media, and no new CDs." Geneon has the license to lots of new DVDs, including Hellsing Ultimate (which is mainly what they were promoting this show), which is Hellsing in OVA, but it's been slow in release because the Japanese studio is slow in release. Their reasons for the high def media is that the market hasn't decided on the winner yet, and Geneon is small company, and high def players just aren't out there in high enough numbers out there to have a big enough market for anime. As one of the Geneon guys pointed out 90% of anime fans don't have a high def player yet, and of that 10%, maybe 1% buys the high def version of the anime, in order for them to make it work for them, they'd have to charge like $1000 per high def, so for the moment, high definition discussion is shelved. Regarding their CDs, they use to have a anime CD section at Suncoast Video and Sam Goody, but those shops are gone now, so until they can find a good store outlet, there won't be additional CDs except as box set pack-ins.
Production I.G.'s panel short summary is that Mamoru Oshii working on a new movie called "The Sky Chasers", some stuff licensed, somethings not. Wellbert, Reideen, Guardian of the Sacred Spirit, IGPX were what we were shown clips of.
I also caught a preview of Romeo x Juliet, a new imagining of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.
A full walkthrough of the path one needs to take to get to the con is in the extended.
If you haven't registered yet, you get off the parking structure, and a short walk away is the registration area:
Once you finish registering, you climb some indoor stairs and you wind up with a goodie bag:
After you grab your bag, you're directed to go up a flight of steps to the next level:
After climbing those steps, you go down the stairs and head for that small stairway in the left hand corner.
I should note at about this point, one has moved perhaps 50 feet, only to wind up on the opposite side of the street. So what do sensible people do?
We jaywalk across the street of course.
Walk another block and you wind up at Pine and Ocean Blvd, where one needs to climb two more stair cases before one reaches the top:
Now, one can enter the Long Beach Convention Center:
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