Fanime 2008: Day 1
Today was the first day of Fanime 2008, San Jose’s big annual Anime convention.
This is my first anime con; it runs for four days, with seven rooms showing different anime and Japanese movies. I have two things on my “must see” lists, and about six things on my “try real hard to see” list. Today, the only thing on the lists was Rebuild of Evangelion 01, yet another version of Neon Genesis Evangelion.
So how was it? Well… I found it quite uneven. I was reminded of the hue and cry when George Lucas re-edited the Star Wars movies from my childhood. In fact, I was quite tempted to yell out “Han shot first!” It seems the plot is about 90% the same as the original Evangelion, and 10% is new, but because there’s only 90 minutes to tell the story of the first six episodes, a lot of things just jump out with no explanation.
The animation seems to be largely from the original anime, with some segments re-animated where the plot changed, and a lot move “movement” shots done with computer graphics. Again, uneven… Misato’s appearance is significantly different in the new sequences, and when they’re juxtaposed right next to the original animation, it’s quite obvious. Most of the graphics in NERV HQ have been replaced with computer graphics, but in a few places they still use the original graphics animation. Shinji is still whiny, but there were one or two places where I thought I saw positive character development… Then it was back to whining.
Overall, not as good as I’d hoped; but there’s enough new that I’ll undoubtedly watch the next three parts when they come out.
Other stuff I watched: Part of Karas (very nice looking but not really my preferred genre,) and a bit of the Shakugan no Shana marathon (again, not really my type.)
Most of the rest of the day, I was wandering around with my camera taking pictures of Cosplayers. Some photos are up on my Flickr page.
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