Sakura-Con 2014: Day 0-2

Sakura-Con is dated kind of badly; I like to hang out at home for Easter and I was really swamped work-wise before having to jet off to Seattle. But at the same time it’s the kind of convention that I look forward to a lot, because this is my first time visiting Seattle and the place is basically like LA/AX but with all the things I dislike fixed. The con is downtown and very walkable, it’s not super crowded, lots of great eats in walking distance, and wait for it–Japanese guests!

Joke aside, I didn’t even got that excited about the Japanese guests. They’re cool and all, and I still am a Masunari Koji fan. But you know what instantly make any anime convention great? THE IDOLM@STER. So in that sense, I got to meet Toshifumi Akai, who is one of the key animators on anim@s. He didn’t get to work on the movie, we suspect, because he was neck deep in Magi Season 2 at the time, along with Masunari. Akai’s main contribution, I guess, are OP1 where he animated a few key cuts and being an animation director for a couple others. He probably also animated some key scenes here and there. If I can scan Backstage M@ster I could show you the horizontal pans he did for one of the concert scenes. Anyway, this guy is a lot of fun.

It’s always great to run into Nagahama. It’s always great to not go to his events because you’ve been to all his events at Animazement, LOL, but I was pretty busy with other things?

I wasn’t able to go to the couple Titan events because they got packed out. I went to a couple Renji Murata ones but they’re kind of mediocre, mostly because the attendees were meh at the long Q&A sessions his panels became (didn’t even sit through the whole thing). I went to a couple Aniplex panels, probably because of timing and how it worked out.

The Friday night IM@S panel was pretty fun, but it was also very, very 4chan and that kind of sucked. Just because you have a smart deck that has good jokes doesn’t mean you can give attention to people who interrupt your panel for the luls? It needed mods.

I better get to the Sunday IM@S panel in a few. Meanwhile enjoy a tweet of Adachi’s Kancolle at work pic.


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