Saturday, November 22, 2008
I had an absolutely fantastic time at the inaugural Anime Festival Asia yesterday. Here's a detailed account of what happened at the AFA yesterday.
I arrived at the Suntec exhibition hall around 11am yesterday and was pretty surprised to see a long snaking queue lining up for tickets outside the entrance. I had to queue for about 45 minutes before I was able to purchase tickets for myself and Shilei and her friends.
However, I had much less to complain about than those who did the online pre-registration - these people were promised a shorter queue for their 2-day passes, but the pre-registration queue was dissolved soon after I arrived at the hall, and by 11.45am people who had pre-registered had to join the same snaking queue as those who hadn't...
Shilei and I headed first for the Graphite art exhibition and our so-called club booth which was selling CDS material (!!), where we met Moogle, who was trying to mould clay into beads for her cosplay costume, and KC, Gabriel and Zirong, who were playing around with a figurine of some alien-like man supposed to be our new male club mascot who likes YAOI (!!!).
Shilei and I walked around looking at the booths for a while, but we didn't actually DO much because the place was so crowded and chaotic and we couldn't be bothered to join all the queues for the various free stuff. There was even an extremely long queue outside the KKnM booth, which also had bouncers on all four corners of their little space to prevent anyone from entering without queueing. I usually like doing my shopping slowly and in peace and quiet, but the jostling crowds and incessant noise made browsing impossible and after a while I totally put off any attempt to buy anything. One of my seniors, Adeline, later told me that she felt the same way - I guess we're all getting old...
Although AFA was indeed held on a much larger scale than any other anime convention held in Singapore before, there wasn't much that really appealed to me. I'm not a figurine collector (and I have absolutely zero interest in mecha and Gundam), so the displays of priceless and award-winning figurines didn't mean anything special to me. The exhibition of original drawings by the mangaka of Dragonball, Deathnote, D-Grayman and Naruto published in Shounen JUMP were interesting, but there were too few artworks exhibited for the exhibition to have the 'wow' factor. The crowds at the Latendo area were stupendous because the store was offering a 70% discount, but like I've said earlier, I'm not a figurine collector.
The artist alley was paltry compared to what we've seen at Cosfest and EOY, and the artworks weren't particularly attractive. Shilei and I also gave the arcade section a miss, as Shilei plays non-versus-games such as Guitar Freaks and I don't play arcade games at all. As for the anime screenings, it didn't make sense for Odex to screen D-Grayman, Shana, Casshern Sins and Skip Beat if they were already broadcasting these series on Okto...
However, the Graphite art exhibition was a success and I must say I'm proud that the anime club has managed to make Graphite more prominent in the local anime community. The standard of the artworks submitted this year has also increased considerably. BUT the prize presentation was not executed very well, but that's not something I wish to go into greater detail here...
Even though we were a small group, the anime club alumni cheered very loudly when Juliana went up on stage to receive her prize. I'm still amazed (pleasantly, of course) that the drawing which was supposed to be the poster design for the competition won the competition in the end. Jul's drawing even has our (former) club mascot Shouryuu in the corner carrying a large strawberry! It seems like a recognition of artistic talent in our own club, haha.
So I didn't have a great time at AFA because of the event itself - I had a great time because of the wonderful company I had. I went for lunch at the Japanese food section of Food Republic with Shilei, her friends and K* and G*****l, whom the more I saw together, the more I was convinced they would make a star BL couple in the club. I was pratically going "kyaaaaa" internally when K* sat next to G*****l and gave him food from his plate. *___*
As none of the members of the alumni were interested in Mizuki Ichirou aka The King of Anime Songs, and Yanhua was starved, we left at around 5pm and headed to Waraku at Marina Square for an early dinner. We had loads of fun talking about Jul's love of various male anime characters, including the shuai (??) Kakashi who has unfortunately been killed off in the most recent chapter of Naruto. Oops, there goes a spoiler.
After dinner, we met up with Reboot and CK and adjourned to Coffee Club for coffee and cake. The conversation really took off here and we had even more fun talking about weddings and "Grinny" in Harry Potter and the "bashful" Bond in Quantum of Solace (language jokes courtesy of Yanhua) and why Yanhua prefers to ogle at Science girls who wear T-shirts and jeans instead of Arts girls who wear much less and how we got conned into joining USP...
I could feel not just caffeine and chocolate coursing through my veins but the real camaraderie between us. I really do hope we will become even better friends as we spend more time with each other in the coming years. It will not be easy as most of us are now working, but I think this is a group of people who really make the effort to meet up and who are interested to know what's going on in each other's lives, and that's the kind of friends I think are really worth having.
kaoru said at 6:07 PM
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