This year’s Anime Festival Asia 2009 felt a lot better than 2008’s. Firstly, there wasn’t any queue at the booth for people who bought the concert tickets (concert ticket buyers get free entry) so we were able to get in pretty quickly at around 10am.
I didn’t buy much this year. Just a small $30 Ranka Lee figurine and an AFA09, “I love anisong” (anime song) $45 T-Shirt to show off that I was there, lol
Day 1.
Watched preview of Mamoru Hosoda’s Summer Wars anime movie which will begin showing in Singapore next year around Feb 25.
As my group secured seats near the front, we split into 2 to take turns to secure those seats and also to have space to leave our bags and the things we bought at AFA.
Next up was the Regional Cosplay event. Quite good.
Malaysia’s team had a funny skit but ended with an internet meme which is totally not related to anime. It was the funniest team but half the audience probably didn’t know about that American meme about Kanye hijacking Taylor Swift’s speech.
But then something silly (it seemed that way for me) happened.
The Singapore team, with the guy cosplaying as a Gundam mecha won both Special (2nd) prize (BROTHER Sewing machine) and Grand (1st) prize (A pair of return tickets to Japan). And there were only 2 prizes for this competition.
The special prize should have at least gone to the Philippine or Indonesia team.
I know it’s really hard to make a Gundam mecha costume. The skit didn’t feel impressive to me, probably because I haven’t watched that series. Also the mecha on stage just seemed to be swinging around slowly and repeating his moves, dropping a few armor parts from the “damage”.
After that I went around shooting cosplayers and explored the booths. On my way back for Danny Choo‘s event, my friend who bought some of Shoko Nakagawa’s (Shoko-tan) CDs asked me to join him to queue up and get Shoko-tan to sign his CD for him. Everyone received a piece of paper to write their names on for Shoko to write the names and sign.
I missed Danny Choo’s event but it seemed that he was just going through presentations he’s given before like talking about his website, which I’ve already seen when Animax invited him to give a talk about blogging some time earlier this year.
After that we had late lunch, which will also be our dinner, at Marina Square, and relaxed until the concert at night.
This year’s concert had 4 artists, 2 more than last year’s. For the first night, we started off with Shoko Nakagawa’s performance.
Her first song sent everyone, including me, screaming in joy; Cruel Angel’s Thesis (Evangelion TV anime series OP.) Perfect choice especially when we’ve just watched Eva 2.0.
She sang Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagen songs and had her manager(?) help her take a photo of her with the audience with her camera phone while she’s on stage. My seat was the 3rd row, right at the middle, which unfortunately is also right behind her in that photo.
Next was Hatsune Miku, a virtual idol. The opening of “Miku miku ni shite ageru” is perfect for a concert. Gets everyone fired up.
Lastly is Ichirou Mizuki. He also appeared in AFA08. I’m not a huge fan of his but when I hear his strong voice and see him smiling as he sings, I cheered together with the rest of the crowd.
And that’s all for Day 1.