animeboston

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Pokemon: Detective Pikachu has a Strong Box Office Debut

While Avengers: Endgame is out there shattering every box office record in the history of cinema, this week’s numbers have shown that not ALL of the strength at the movies has been hoarded by Iron Man, Captain America, Groot, etc.

A good deal of strength has been displayed by none other than a tiny, adorable Pikachu.

Pokemon: Detective Pikachu, starring Justice Smith, Ken Watanabe, and Ryan Reynolds as the voice of the title character, had a very strong debut week at the U.S. box office, earning over $66 million. According to Box Office Mojo, the film’s strong opening is the highest ever for a film adaptation of a video game. What’s more, it is receiving very positive reviews from audiences and critics alike; with an average grade of A-, it is one of only 6 video game films to ever surpass a “B” average with CinemaScore. Interestingly enough, three of the other video game films to achieve this honor have been the previous three animated Pokemon film installments.

And what’s not to love? Pokemon: Detective Pikachu combines action, humor, and heart and is pleasing for Pokemon fans young and old, casual and diehard, with plenty of almost every Pokemon hidden throughout the movie as well as throwbacks to previous adaptations of Nintendo’s hit franchise. Come on, where have you seen a team of Squirtles putting out a fire before?!

Box Office Mojo also seemed confident in its assertion that Pokemon: Detective Pikachu has the power to become the most successful video game film of all time once it has finished its run. If the love for Deadpool ever happens to fade away for one reason or another, Ryan Reynolds could very well have another adorable franchise to fall back on.

--Mike Fenn, AB staff blogger

[animeboston]

We are happy to announce our dates and theme for Anime Boston 2020! Our dates for next year are April 10-12, 2020 and our theme is “Bento in Boston”! Get your food on!

We at Anime Boston also want to take a moment to thank you, the attendees, for coming out to #AnimeBoston2019. We hope you enjoyed yourselves and had a great time! From the panels you submit to the cosplay you participate in, you are what makes Anime Boston unique and special.

We can’t do this event without your support and input. Please use the bit.ly link below to provide us with any feedback you have. No matter how big or small the issue, we appreciate your words. We can’t guarantee that we’ll fix everything, but we will listen and try.

http://bit.ly/AB19_FeedbackThread

Thank you all again and stay tuned for more information on next year's convention. We’re on to #AnimeBoston2020!

[animeboston]

Be sure to fill in our Feedback Survey while you still have #AnimeBoston2019 fresh in your mind! We hope everyone had a wonderful weekend with us. We are always looking for ways to improve your experience for next year! Let us know what worked and what didn't! http://bit.ly/AB2019_Feedback https://www.instagram.com/p/BwpWzWpnZfP/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=47xpvzej0x1t

[animeboston]

Scenes from the Anime Boston Sunday Photo Suite. Thanks for coming by Hynes 102 and showing off your incredible cosplay! 

[animeboston]

Closing Ceremonies 2019: Don't Be Sad It's Over...

Closing ceremonies and the feedback panel are over. The staff is packing up and the doors are closed. Anime Boston 2019 has officially ended. I know, I’m sad too.

But what a year 2019 was. Concerts by MIYAVI and Yoko Shimomura, premieres of new movies from Code Geass and City Hunter, a visit from the New England Patriots’ anime club, and those are just the head lines. That doesn’t include the panels, the events like dances, the videos, and the time spent in between with old friends, or friends you’ve just met.

These past three days have been a blur in the best way possible, and it’s all been thanks to you attendees. As Con Chair Kristen Leiding said at closing ceremonies, “Thank you all for the passion and energy that you bring.” We hope you’ll bring that same passion and energy back next year for Anime Boston 2020, from April 10th thru 12th.

On a side note, 2019 marks the 10th year of the Anime Boston blog. Thank you to all of you who have read, liked, and shared our posts. Getting to work for the Anime Boston blog is the sweetest gig ever, and we get to keep doing it because of you. So from all of us here at the Anime Boston blog, thank you, deeply and truly.

So until next time…

- Andrew, AB Staff Blogger

[animeboston]

Anime Boston Charity Auction Raises $25,264

Thank you to everyone who donated the prizes for the auction, and thank you to everyone who bid. Thanks to your incredible generosity, we were able to raise $25,264 for the Greater New England Chapter of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. That’s more than the $23,222 we raised last year to help in the fight for a future free of MS. Thank you all, and we hope you’ll support the charity auction again next year!

Edit: Total earned amount has been updated. Sorry for the confusion!

- Andrew, AB Staff Blogger

[animeboston]

5 Things You Didn't Know About the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Program

Ever wanted to live in Japan, but don’t have the resources to do so? As long as you have a bachelors degree, the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Program wants YOU to live in Japan, and it’s easier to qualify than you think!

Here are five facts you may not have known about the JET program:

1) You don’t need to know Japanese

Want to teach English in Japan? Then you simply need to know English. Some applicants think they’ll need to be experts in Japanese in order to apply, but that isn’t the case. The JET program wants you to learn Japanese while on the job. It can even be helpful sometimes if you don’t know a lot of Japanese because it means your students will have to practice their English!

2) JET comes with a full-time salary and free health insurance

When you sign up for JET, you earn a livable full-time salary (3,360,000 at the time of this writing) and free Japan national healthcare. Your flight to Japan for the job is fully paid for, as is your flight home when the job is complete in 1 to 5 years. You can also bring your spouse and dependents with you, and no, they don’t need to be members of the JET program as well.

3) How long you stay in Japan is up to you (sort of)

Well, you and your contracting agency. JET is the go-between that finds people to fill civil service contracts for foreigners at schools and English-teaching organizations. If you do a good job, your contracting agency can keep you on for up to five years, if you want!

4) It’s not always an English teaching job

Did you know that some JET participants teach sports? It can happen. It’s rare, but if you’re recognized as an athlete, you can coach a sport. If you have proficient Japanese skills, you may also work in a local government office as a cultural liaison, translating documents, promoting cultural events, and sometimes interacting with foreign celebrities as they come through.

5) Diverse applicants welcome!

The Association of JET provides support groups for participants of all walks of life. There’s Stonewall Japan (which supports LGBTQ JET members), JETs of African Descent, Veg JET for vegetarians, and many more. There are also counseling services, support networks, and events and activities for participants to partake in while living in Japan.

Learn more about JET on the official website.

— John, AB Staff Blogger

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Anime You Must Miss: Digging Through Trash For Fun

There is a very important distinction to be drawn between an anime being good and an anime being fun. An anime can be of incredible quality, with top notch animation, art style, characters, and pacing, and yet not be fun. Anyone who has watched Grave of the Fireflies knows what I’m talking about. On the other hand, a show can be terribly designed, with bad design, poor pacing, and miserable characters, and still be very fun to watch. For example, the Central Park Media dub of Garzey’s Wing.

As a contrast to his earlier panel, The Toddfather’s panel “Anime You Must Miss” is about that second category of anime. It’s about garbage anime for people who enjoy watching terrible media. Here are a few of the series he mentioned:

Darling in the Franxx - DitF is not a good anime. It starts out with an interesting concept, has a strong first half, but then it loses its way and completely melts down. This is a 24 episode case study in wasted potential, but once it goes off rails it becomes a true train wreck, worthy of watching but only from a distance.

Hand Shakers: Anime with an incomprehensible plot is fairly common. Hand Shakers stands out by pairing a nonsense plot with an overly fluid animation style that is legitimately nausea inducing.

My Sister My Writer: If Darling in the FranXX is a show with potential melting down, then My Sister My Writer is a show that had no chance from the start, with the people making it realizing that in the middle of making it. This is a show where the animation quality deteriorated so badly that one animator was credited with a pseudonym that roughly translates into “Honestly, I’m screwed.”

My Wife is the Student Council President: Here’s a show that had no chance due to its structure. A harem anime can be good if the show allows the characters to develop and establish connections with the target of their affections. My Wife is the Student Council President is a harem series made up of 13 episodes, each 7 minutes in length. The result is a show that consists only of the insufferable hijinks of harem animes, with none of the substance.

It may seem odd to intentionally watch a bad anime, but I firmly believe that watching bad anime can make you a better media connoisseur. It helps you calibrate your taste for what is or isn’t good, and see what does and doesn’t work. After all, there are only a few ways to do something correctly, but there’s no shortage of ways to fail. Just make sure it’s entertainingly bad anime, and not unwatchably bad anime (sup, Disgaea).

- Andrew, AB Staff Blogger

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Separating Samurai Myth from Fact

Beloved anime con panelist and anthropologist Charles Dunbar spent early Sunday afternoon presenting one of their newer panels, Samurai Stories. As is often the case with a Dunbar panel, it was informative, engaging, and left the packed audience with a greater understanding of--and appreciation for--one of Japan’s most well-known classes.

Dunbar went into great detail on the history of the samurai in Japan and how they were able to do everything from reinventing themselves (they were everything from a warrior class to nobles) to helping establish dynasties. If you weren’t at the panel, here are some interesting samurai facts that you missed out on:

While commonly being associated with Japanese culture, the very early samurai actually came to the country from Korea

There is a legend that famed samurai Minamoto no Yoshitsune disappeared after being betrayed, emigrated to Mongolia, and changed his name to Genghis Khan in an effort to exact revenge. While an obvious myth, how great would it be if this were reality?

The early samurai actually detested swords, preferring instead lances and bows and arrows, thanks to those weapons’ effectiveness in distance fighting. Why wait until you are a sword’s length away from your enemy when you could have taken them out from afar?

Tomoe Gozen, a famed female samurai who proved her warrior worth to an unbelieving spouse, lived into her 90s and died as a Buddhist nun. These days, her image is sadly also the trademarked mascot of a Taiwanese squid restaurant.

Usagi Yojimbo was Japan’s attempt to explain samurai to the U.S. In addition to a series of comics, Yojimbo also appeared in several episodes of the 1980s version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

If you’re looking for the most accurate portrayal of samurai, look no further than Akira Kurosawa’s epic Shinichi no Samurai. This film almost never saw the light of day, thanks to the then-occupation of Japan by the U.S., whose forces banned samurai flicks because they may inspire people to rise up against the ruling class. 

George Lucas basically ripped off the history of samurai to create the Jedi in Star Wars.

--Mike Fenn, AB staff blogger

[animeboston]

Diversity in the Magical Girl Genre: Because Anyone Can Fight For Justice

What do you think of when you think of magical girl anime? Maybe you think of a lighthearted classic magical girl, like Sailor Moon. Maybe you think of something more modern or darker, like Madoka Magica. But no matter who you think of, odd are they share the following characteristics: light skinned, slim, and come from a typical background.

But the magical girl genre can be more than that. It’s a genre about people who use magic or hyper-advanced technology to become so much more than they typically are. That doesn’t have to be limited to just your typical anime pretty girl. Fortunately, there are anime that have expanded their reach and shown a more diverse vision of what the magical girl genre can be. That was the subject of Ninapedia’s panel “Diversity in the Magical Girl Genre”. Here are some of the anime she listed which embraces a more inclusive vision of magical girls:

PreCure: This is a long running magical girl franchise with, through its various iterations, has included a very diverse cast. There are characters which are LGBT, characters with a variety of racial/ethnic backgrounds, including a biracial magical girl, characters with atypical family backgrounds, such as divorced or interracial parents, and characters which mental health issues, such as PTSD. Even the boys get in the act, with one of them, who identifies as a boy, publicly wearing a dress because he thinks it look pretty.

PriPara: This is a magical idol show with an impressive variety of body types. This show features a magical girl who is fat, but she isn’t shamed or excluded. It features adult magical girls, which is daring given Japanese cultural attitudes towards older women (look up the term “Christmas cake” if you’re unfamiliar). It also features a trans characters and a boy and a girl who cross-dress.

Revolutionary Girl Utena & YuriKuma Arashi: Ah, Kunihiko Ikuhara. If there’s a go-to person for works that deconstruct the magical girl genre, it’s Ikuhara. And as you would expect, that means lots of diversity. Both Utena and YuriKuma are full of queer characters (heck, YuriKuma’s name translated to English is “Lesbian Bear Storm”), and rampant subversion of gender norms. Also, the character Anthy in Utena is a rare example of a magical girl whose skin is a truly dark color, without it just being a lighter skinned person with a tan.

But these are just a few of the series Ninapedia mentioned, and she went well beyond just anime. There is a large amount of non-anime magical girl projects with diverse casts (such as Emara: Emirates Hero & Steven Universe), as well as numerous indie media projects. So look around and you’ll be rewarded by the wide variety of viewpoints you can find in this one genre.

- Andrew, AB Staff Blogger

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The most $$$ item at the Anime Boston Charity Auction:

Yes, it may appear to you to be a simple folding table. But at the Anime Boston 2019 Charity Auction, it sold for a winning bid of $1170. 

What you’re actually looking at is a guaranteed table at the Artist Alley for Anime Boston 2020. Usually, artists must enter into a lottery to be allowed to sell their wares in the Artist Alley, leaving their fate up to chance. 

A notable second place? An Anime Boston Program Guide signed by five of the New England Patriots (who came to visit Saturday) sold for $800. 

As always, all proceeds from the Anime Boston Charity Auction go to the National MS Society, the convention’s charity partner for 10+ years!

— Lauren, AB Staff Blogger

[animeboston]

Before you descend into post-con depression, stop by Hynes 207 @ 4 PM today for our Feedback Panel! If you are unable to attend, don't worry! You can also leave your feedback on our forums. We would love to hear from you!

https://forums.animeboston.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=24166

[animeboston]

Jesus Has Returned to Anime Boston!

Since Anime Boston usually falls over Easter weekend every year, it is not uncommon to see Jesus--or even multiple Jesuses (Jesii?)--shopping in the dealer's room or seated nearby in a panel room.

“Jesus Jones” has been coming to Anime Boston since 2012 (which, coincidentally, was supposed to be the year that the world ended). Every year except for one, Jones has cosplayed Jesus on all three days of the convention. And fans tend to react positively to his presence, constantly asking for pictures.

“The most memorable reaction I've had is the year when about 12 people gathered around me, singing church songs and clapping,” Jones said.

--Mike, AB staff blogger

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From our sponsors Funimation: It's All Might vs. All For One! Take home Season 3 Part 1 and a ton of exclusive content.

Buy: https://funi.to/MHABoston #myheroacademia @myheroacademia

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A Q&A With The City Hunter Staff

Anime Boston 2019 is proud to have been the host of the North American premiere for City Hunter: Shinjuku Private Eyes. Since its manga release in 1985, City Hunter has been a global media franchise, even including a Hong Kong film starring Jackie Chan.

On Saturday night, a crowd of roughly 600 Anime Boston attendees got to premiere the film and ask questions to the production staff. We’ve condensed a few of the most interesting parts of the Q&A section for you to check out. Note that these answers have been translated into English and then paraphrased for clarity.

The City Hunter Staff:

Naohiro Ogata, Producer

Other credits: Gundam NT, Gundam UC, Gundam Reconguista in G

Kenji Kodama, Animation Director

Other credits: Cat’s Eye, Cased Closed, Kekkaishi

Yoichi Kato, Script Writer

Other credits: Yo-Kai Watch, Aikatsu!, Space Brothers

Goh Wakabayashi, Aniplex Producer for City Hunter

Q: Why did you decide to premiere the new movie at Anime Boston?

Ogata: The reason we are at Anime Boston is because Wakabayashi and Kodama were both exchange students in Boston a long time ago. Why that is relevant to the movie, the main villain studied abroad at a university that was influenced by MIT.

Q: What should fans pay attention to in the new movie?

Kato: The main point I wanted to stress is that this film takes place in Shinjuku in the present day Japan. Take notes on places you want to go when you visit Shinjuku.

Q: This is the first City Hunter production in 20 years, but the main voice actor is the same?

Wakabayashi: Akira Kamiya, the voice actor of Ryu Saeba, is over 70. Though he is older and his voice has changed, he was glad to do Ryu again after all these years. We spent three days recording voices. Kamiya listened to the trailer and volunteered to do some of the scenes again because he thought he could do better. So while the movie trailer used the original recording, the movie itself contains the second take.

Q: What was your favorite scene?

Ogata: The Godzilla missile scene. We had our own sound effects for Godzilla, but then Toei Animation told us, “Please use our actual sound effects of Godzilla roar.” So when you hear it, that’s the authentic Godzilla roar from Toei’s archive.

Q: What did you think of the American fans’ reaction to the premiere?

Kodama: It's been two months since the premiere in Japan. We were amazed at the reaction here, which was bigger than in Japan even! It was amazing to watch!

Kato: I feel the same way as Kodama. You guys had the best reaction. You even laughed at some parts I wasn't expecting to get laughs at!

Wakabayashi: I really like that you guys enjoyed the action and comedy!

— John, AB Staff Blogger

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Watch the winners of the Anime Boston AMV contest!

Did you know that the first Anime Music Video (AMV) was created in 1982? Former Otakon staffer Jim Kaposztas hooked up two VCRs to mix the most violent footage he could find from Star Blazers with the Beatles’ song “All You Need Is Love.”

AMVs have come a long way since those early days, and today fans used advanced digital editing techniques to splice your favorite shows with unexpected musical accompaniments entertain anime fans with some truly creative masterpieces.

We’ve collected the winners of the 2019 Anime Boston AMV Contest for your viewing and listening pleasure. Though we can’t legally link them, we trust that you know how to Google.

Best Trailer/Commercial Winner — Plus Ultra Bodywash by Maboroshi Studio

Best Drama Winner — Never Enough by AnimeTwins

Best Action Winner — The Greatest Revue by MadMegatax

Best Romance/Sentimental Winner — Mummy Days by TheDestineeAMV

Best Upbeat Winner — Miracle Whip by Mycathatesyou69

Best Other Winner — KMS: Kawaii Metal Symphony by Bimyou

Best Fun/Comedy Winner —  It's Up to Yuri by Rider4Z

Best Concept Winner — Undefined by Trebleclef

Best Editing Winner — Pachyderm Panic by drewaconclusion

Editors Choice Winner — Happy Little Clouds by Glitzer

Judges Choice Winner — Row Row Remix by BecauseImBored1

Coordinator's Choice Winner — The Ouran Side by BecauseImBored1

Best of Show Winner — A Dying Bread by Kisanzi

Most of the winning videos are available on YouTube.

— Lauren, AB Staff Blogger

[animeboston]

On a scale of 1 to Yoko Shimomura, how excited would you be to meet the New England Patriots?