ANIMAXIS.COM - Zine - AX2001

AX2001 - The ANIMAXIS Experience

A Slave Reports

Elche-kun helping out with an ANIMAXIS bag

Elche-kun was one of the wonderful people who gave us about 4 days out of their lives to help us out at the ANIMAXIS booth during Anime Expo.

He's a cute little Japanese guy, who reminds me a bit of Detective Conan, who has been living and studying in Canada since Sept 2000 as a graduate student at the University of Guelph (Guelph is a city located about an hour west away by car from Toronto).

He is studying International and Third World Development (not exactly related to anime), but he's a keen anime fan. It was the first time for him to participate in a large event although he has been to a few.

Elche-kun worked really hard at AX and we are very grateful that he came all the way from Canada to help us out - especially with the driving as he is used to driving on the right hand side of the road - whereas the rest of us were freaking out about being on the wrong side of the road!

But that is not his only secret talent...he also has the amazing ability to appear in photos - something we discovered after processing the pics that we took at the ANIMAXIS booth...

And his secret dream? Well he wants to become just like the Dad in My Friend Totoro...

Elche-kun in his counter pose

Elche-kun on his way to becoming a cel expert...

I had a good time working at the ANIMAXIS booth but unfortunately didn't have much time to look around the expo - so it seemed to be much smaller to me than it probably really was!

I thought that the ANIMAXIS booth was pretty good and it was fun seeing the other merchandising booths try to match our prices. I thought that the layout was generally pretty good, although we ended up having a few "dead" spots where it was kinda hard to see stuff.

It was great meeting the ANIMAXIS staff and other people who came to have a chat at the booth - I made quite a few new friends. I also learned a lot about cels - having had to talk about them so much!

The most interesting observation I made though was how many of the American anime fans are Asian-American and it made me think that anime really hasn't moved too much into the mainstream yet and still seems to be a sub-culture kind of thing.

Also the most popular products seemed to be the ones from anime shown in America - maybe a lot of people don't know how to find out about stuff that is new and popular in Japan.

Maybe it's mean but I enjoyed telling people that Dragonball had finished in Japan and isn't so popular anymore! Also I thought that the cosplayers were great - although some of them were indescribable! And I sure did enjoy my sleep - when I had the chance to get some!

The worst part of the Expo for me was the traffic. Especially on the July 4th night when a couple of us went on a KFC run - and it took us two hours to get back to the hotel. We were in the car surrounded by the smell of chicken and chips all that time - having not eaten since breakfast - but we knew that it would be unfair to eat as the guys working back at the hotel also hadn't eaten since breakfast and must have been starving too...