AnimeNext 2006 in Sound Bytes

By Margaret O'Connell
August 1, 2006

Seen in the mini-park in the mall behind the Holiday Inn at AnimeNext 2006, held in Secaucus, New Jersey, June 16-18: An impromptu picnic of Fullmetal Alchemist fans hosted by voice actor Vic Mignogna, the English-language voice of FMA protagonist Edward Elric, who was offering people fresh raspberries as I walked by on my way to the Meadowlands Exposition Center. Unusually, of the ten or so fans present at this event, only two were costumed as the undersized blond, braided Edward, one of whom was somewhat inappropriately tall and brunette. There was also one girl cosplaying as Winry Rockbell, Ed's childhood friend and automail mechanic, but the rest of the picnic-goers all appeared to be in civilian clothes.

Young woman in long Japanese coat with large cream and brown checks, talking on cellphone while walking between the Meadowlands Exposition Center and the Holiday Inn where anime was being shown: "I'm in the obnoxious Inuyasha Rin costume. [In the Inuyasha anime TV series, the character Rin is a little girl who appears to be under ten years old.] I look like a pizza."

Seen on a t-shirt for sale in the AnimeNext dealers' room: "The First Law of Cosplay: Cosplayers Must Choose a Character Utterly Unsuited to Their Body Type." Actually, the grown-up Rin wasn't that bad in this department, despite her apparent failure to even attempt the character's topknot hairstyle. At least, not compared to the elderly lady I saw at AnimeNext a year or two ago cosplaying as Inuyasha's fullblooded demon half-brother Sesshomaru. This was especially inapropos because in the anime, Sesshomaru has the kind of glamorous high-elven beauty which makes it obvious why one of the names the ancient Irish Celts had for their local analogue of this sort of supernatural being was the Ever-Young.

Fullmetal Alchemist inside joke seen on another T-shirt for sale at the same booth: "Equivalent exchange is for losers."

*****

Flashback to AnimeNext 2005/Audience member to Vic Mignogna (who did the voices of both the Phantom Thief Dark in DNAngel and Edward Elric in Fullmetal Alchemist): "If you were the Phantom Thief Dark right now, what would you steal?" Mignogna: "I would steal every bit of Fullmetal Alchemist merchandise in the building. Okay — I'd steal all the DNAngel stuff, too." Audience member: "Then the dealers' room would be completely empty."

This was not all that far from the truth last year, when the DVDs of DNAngel were still in the process of being released here and Fullmetal Alchemist was only halfway through its American run on Cartoon Network. This year, on the other hand, I didn't spot any DNAngel items for sale at all. As for Fullmetal Alchemist, there was actually a wider variety of different tie-in merchandise for that series than I'd seen at the convention in 2005: alchemical-symbol necklaces and replicas of official state alchemist watches; flat round cushions shaped like the scowlie-face caricature of himself Ed tends to create in the course of demolishing things; a stuffed doll of "Munich Ed," costumed as he is in the upcoming Fullmetal Alchemist movie; a number of untranslated FMA doujinshi (fan-created comics); and a couple of licensed T-shirts I hadn't seen before, including one featuring the blood seal from Ed's younger brother Alphonse Elric's armor. However, these took up a smaller proportion of the available booth space, and were often less prominently displayed than they had been the year before. There were relatively few Fullmetal Alchemist action figures — no Als or Roy Mustangs, only two or three Eds and a single Winry — and none of the keychains with miniature charms of FMA characters attached which I'd seen the previous year.

At least, that was how it looked by the time I finally got into the dealers' room halfway through Saturday afternoon. It's possible that there had originally been a lot more FMA stuff which sold out before I got there. Still, even though the anime series had concluded its Cartoon Network run a couple of months earlier, AnimeNext did have four major Fullmetal Alchemist voice actors as guests. In addition to Mignogna, there were Caitlin Glass (Winry), Laura Bailey (Lust), and Colleen Clinkenbeard, who had directed almost half of the episodes in addition to providing the voices of Rose and Lieutenant Riza Hawkeye.

Each of these actors appeared on two or three other panels in addition to the one officially Fullmetal-themed one. So even though it was halfway through the convention weekend by the time I entered the dealers' room, I was a bit surprised that most of the vendors seemed to have less visible merchandise related to Fullmetal Alchemist on display than they did for Naruto (which is admittedly still running on Cartoon Network and apparently getting good ratings) and even Bleach, which wasn't being shown at the convention and hasn't been licensed for DVD in the U.S. market yet.

Most annoying policy change since the previous year: not allowing anyone to enter the dealers' room with a bag larger than the smaller-than-a-standard-shopping-bag-size plastic crate the convention staffers had positioned at the entrance for comparison purposes. Worse still, not having any place nearby where would-be shoppers could check the bags in question (or have them swathed in brown paper and stapled shut, as the con staffers did at the San Diego Comic-Con art show one year). Most of all, not making it clear in the program that if your bag was too big, your options were limited to either leaving it in your car (if you had one with you); taking it back to your hotel room (if it wasn't so far away that this would involve a twenty minute round trip); or parking it with a friend (if anyone of that description was around, available, and not about to enter the dealers' room at that moment themselves). In practice, this meant that anyone who hadn't fully understood the new bag policy in advance could pretty much forget the idea of simply ducking into the dealers' room for twenty or thirty minutes between events, unless they or someone they knew was staying at one of the hotels within five minutes' walk of the Exposition Center.

*****

Most Duo sightings ever: I've seen people cosplaying as gundam pilot Duo Maxwell from the 1995 anime Gundam Wing exactly five times in my entire convention-going experience, and four of those sightings were at AnimeNext within the last two years. Of course, it was the same guy all four times at AnimeNext. The fifth time I saw a cosplay Duo, which was actually the first occasion chronologically, was at San Diego Comic-Con four or five years ago. This particular Duo was a teenage girl who actually resembled the character somewhat in height and build, despite the fact that her version of Duo's trademark long braid was black instead of the chestnut brown seen in the anime.

The AnimeNext Duo, on the other hand, was a guy in his late twenties or early thirties. In the anime the character is fifteen, but he does survive the interplanetary war which provides much of Gundam Wing's plot. God knows there are enough fanfics about the adventures of the various Gundam pilots years after the events of the TV series that a twenty-eight or thirty-year-old Duo (with five o'clock shadow, the one time I ran into him in the evening) is far from the most incongruous figure ever sighted at a cosplay-intensive convention.

However, I must admit to being somewhat taken aback when a guy in Duo's all-black faux priest garb, right down to the jodhpurs and cap, showed up browsing nearby in the dealers' room at the 2005 AnimeNext. I was even more taken aback when the cosplay Duo accidentally bumped into me. He began apologizing as frantically as if he were rather out-of-characterly re-enacting the scene from the anime in which one of the gundam pilots' enemies, Lady Une, announces on live television that the captured Duo — who, in the actual TV show, remains defiant — will be executed.

Evidently Duo is this particular cosplayer's signature character, because I saw him in costume no less than three times at AnimeNext this year. (I could tell it was the same guy by the waist-length braided hair extension he had clipped onto his own slightly past shoulder length brown ponytail.) Both times I saw him on Sunday morning he was walking around with a red-coated, blond-ponytailed girl dressed as either Edward Elric or the Ed-emulating armorless Fullmetal Alchemist movie version of Edward's younger brother Al. At one point I was walking past them when another cosplayer congratulated "Duo" on his hilarious skit at the masquerade the night before. Since I hadn't attended the masquerade myself, I'm not sure whether the other cosplayer was addressing just "Duo" or his companion as well. There would definitely have been a certain logic to it if the two of them appeared in a skit together, especially if the Elric cosplayer was supposed to be the usually-braided Ed, since Duo and Edward tend to share a lot of the same fans. ("Such love for the pretty braided ones," as one doting Gundam Wing/Fullmetal Alchemist fan put it on LiveJournal.)

*****

The Lady Directors panel: On Sunday, June 18, two of the AnimeNext guest voice actresses who had also directed English-language versions of various anime appeared together on what the convention organizers dubbed the Lady Directors panel. Colleen Clinkenbeard directed numerous episodes of Fullmetal Alchemist and also supplied the English-speaking voices of two of its characters, Rose and Lieutenant Riza Hawkeye. Her previous voice directing experience was on Kiddy Grade. More recently, she has done directing on Kodomo no Omocha, a/k/a Kodocha, and Sakura Taisen: Ecole de Paris. Clinkenbeard's other voice acting credits include the sixteen-year-old galactic law enforcement officer Eclair in Kiddy Grade, eccentric novelist/hands-off stage mother Misako ("Mama") Kurata in Kodocha, and Rachel Moore, who functions as a combination love interest/big sister figure to the young detective hero of Case Closed in his respective guises as teenage Jimmy Kudo and the involuntarily de-aged child "Conan Edogawa."

Laura Bailey is the English-language voice of Tohru Honda, the heroine of Fruits Basket, and of Sana Kurata, the feisty child actress protagonist of Kodocha. Bailey also provided the voices for the seductive villainess Lust in Fullmetal Alchemist and for Rayne, the vampire-slaying protagonist of the videogames Bloodrayne 1 and 2. She has recently added directing to her repertoire, most notably on Gunslinger Girl and Kodocha, as well as several episodes of Case Closed. In addition to having worked together professionally numerous times, the two actresses are friends and roommates who often finish each other's sentences.

Both women have worked chiefly on anime produced by the Texas company Funimation. Laura Bailey said that this particular aspect of her career got started when she was in a play in Dallas with Funimation voice actor Kent Williams "when Dragonball Z was big." This eventually led to an introduction to other members of the Funimation crew and a succession of increasingly meaty voice acting roles. Colleen Clinkenbeard met Laura Bailey while acting with her in her first play in Dallas. Bailey in turn brought Clinkenbeard along to see the Funimation studios. When somebody mentioned in passing that they needed someone who could do accents for a bit part, Bailey quickly chimed in, "Colleen can do accents!" One audition later, Clinkenbeard had her first voice-acting part, as a little Irish boy.

Clinkenbeard explained that anime voice actors often go on to become directors because the original director of a series they're working on is leaving for another project. In such cases, the producers sometimes conclude that someone who is already familiar with the show from personal experience would have an advantage in maintaining consistency of vision when taking over. This was how Clinkenbeard wound up assuming the additional offstage role of director on Fullmetal Alchemist.

Clinkenbeard herself later stepped down as director on that series because she was offered the opportunity to both direct and play the appealingly off-the-wall part of Mama on Kodocha. Although she was able to continue her less time-consuming FMA voice duties throughout the remainder of that show's second season, she noted in response to a question from the audience, "My hardest decisions have been whether to move on to a new project."

Both panelists agreed that if forced to choose between voice acting and directing, they would choose acting. When another audience member asked which job paid more, they explained that acting pays more per hour, but the amount of hours required varies widely depending on the size and scope of the particular part. Since directing is more consistently labor-intensive, it is possible for a director to end up earning more money for a given production than some actors with fairly significant recurring roles.

Asked for tips on how to become an anime director, Clinkenbeard advised getting trained in other related skills, whether on or offscreen. As her own experience suggests, the more an aspiring director knows about the various facets of production, the better grasp he or she will have of what needs to be done to pull a show together as a whole.

Some of the panelists' behind the scenes anecdotes suggested that participants in the more frenetic productions could definitely use all the experience they can get. When Bailey and Clinkenbeard worked on Kodocha, the show's rapid-fire dialogue, abundance of simultaneous verbal and sight-gag action, and occasionally culturally untranslatable humor resulted in the initial scripts being presented to the cast as literal works in progress. Bailey recalled receiving pages riddled with instructions like "Fill in line later" and "Have actress ad lib." As a result, the relevant segments of such scenes inevitably had to be re-recorded at least once.

When an audience member asked whether the panelists ever cosplayed as their characters, both actresses answered no. However, Laura Bailey added that theoretically she could cosplay as Sana from Kodocha, since castmate Chris Sabat had bought her a pink turtleneck like Sana's and even had it embroidered with the word "CHILD," as in one of Sana's signature outfits.

After complying with a request to say something in the voices of each of her most high-profile lead characters, Sana and the humble but indomitable Fruits Baskets heroine Tohru, Bailey mused, "Both Sana and Tohru have the same basic approach — Sana is just a little more psychotic about it." She went on to elaborate on how both characters are consistently upbeat and determined to help people — in some cases whether the people in question actually want to be helped or not.

At one point someone in the audience remarked on the irony of Bailey's alchemically-created FMA character Lust making repeated disparaging remarks about humans even as she schemed to manipulate others into helping her become human herself. This inspired Fullmetal Alchemist director Clinkenbeard to reflect, "You curse that which you cannot do. I love that the characters have the same ambiguities that real life people do."

In the course of reminiscing about other past voice-acting roles, Bailey revealed that she had originally been cast as a different character in Case Closed than the one she wound up playing. However, when the director realized from subsequent scripts that the new character Serena was supposed to be female lead Rachel's best friend, he had Serena's lines from her initial appearances re-recorded with Bailey's voice, since she and Colleen Clinkenbeard, the voice of Rachel, were best friends in real life. Clinkenbeard laughingly complained that because Serena tended to make jokes at the unwitting Rachel's expense, this resulted in the actress being unable to retort while her friend made repeated digs at her onscreen.

Responding to an audience query about which of the characters she'd played she would most like to be in real life, Clinkenbeard concluded, "I'd like to be like Mama [in Kodocha], because she doesn't care what anybody thinks, she's really rich, and she writes at her own pace." To which Laura Bailey replied, "You are like that."

When the convention staffer acting as an informal moderator asked about the potential sexism-induced problems of being a woman director, the panelists pointed out that male directors still outnumber female ones four to one. Both women reported that on the whole they had no real complaints about the way they had been treated by their colleagues in their directorial capacity. However, Colleen Clinkenbeard noted, "I felt that being female was a disadvantage when I became known as a tough director, because [fellow FMA director] Justin Cook is [just] a tough director, but I'm a tough bad word because I'm a girl." (Apparently the panelists had been asked not to use terms like "bitch" when there were children present in the audience, since this "bad word" circumlocution also cropped up in the course of other panels featuring different participants.)

In regard to opportunities for women in voice acting, Laura Bailey said that in contrast to regular acting, in which women insufficiently young-looking to play teens or twentysomethings have a notoriously difficult time finding roles of any substance, in the anime industry "there are women who got started in their forties .... We actually need older women [voice actors] now because there aren't as many of them."

When questioned about which Fullmetal Alchemist character was most difficult to cast, Clinkenbeard said, "Envy was difficult to cast. [Colonel Roy Mustang's best friend, investigations officer] Hughes was very difficult to cast, because we needed someone who could turn on a dime — be very serious but also be totally wacky and make you laugh." The producers auditioned actors for the role of Hughes for four days without success. Then Sonny Straight came back from vacation and they gave him the part as soon as they finished testing him.

Clinkenbeard added that the production staff plays the original Japanese version of each anime scene for the actors before they begin recording in order to give them an idea of the desired tone for each sequence. In another Fullmetal Alchemist behind the scenes insight, she revealed that the actress who played four-year-old Nina Tucker was actually imitating the voice of her own little sister, who was about the same age as the character. Clinkenbeard noted that everyone involved had deliberately played up Nina's endearing cuteness, the better to break the audience's heart over the tragic fate she meets a few episodes later.

Most persistent problem with the anime showings at AnimeNext: The DVD for a given anime concluding half an hour or more before the end of the allotted time slot, then reverting to endless repetitions of the title card/theme song sequence, apparently unbeknownst to the programming staff who were supposedly running the projectors from an AV room down the hall at the Holiday Inn. When the first DVD of Genshiken ran out an hour before the end of the two and a half hour time slot scheduled for it early Saturday evening, I was able to locate a programming staff member who managed to find the next disc so that we could watch an additional two episodes of the show. Unfortunately, when the same thing happened (albeit with only about half an hour left over) at the late-night showing of Loveless Friday night, it turned out that they didn't have anything beyond the first DVD. When it happened yet again a little later Saturday night after only three episodes of Kiddy Grade had been shown instead of the expected four or five, I took one cursory glance around for the lone programming staffer who seemed to know anything useful about the anime set-up. Then I gave up and went to the excellent AnimeNext manga library to kill the excess forty-five minutes reading instead.

Girl audience member to Vic Mignogna at the Fullmetal Supershow FMA voice actors' panel on Saturday, June 17: "I fell in love with Edward because of you."

Flashback to AnimeNext 2005/Vic Mignogna, who not infrequently hugs children (in addition to young adult female fans who request it) at FMA con events, to girl in Ed costume who showed up at a signing right after he had hugged the girl in line before her: "I'm not gonna hug myself!"

*****

For some reason, this was the first anime convention I have ever attended which featured more Trigun cosplayers costumed as the spiky-haired, red-trenchcoated pacifist outlaw Vash than his sharp-shooting priest pal Wolfwood. The latter's past popularity among cosplayers is probably at least partially explained by the fact that Wolfwood's simple black suit and white shirt ensemble are definitely much easier to recreate than Vash's elaborately buttoned and accessorized outfit, even if the six foot high gun-stuffed cross the unorthodox preacher habitually totes around isn't.

Other cosplay costumes sighted this year included a girl dressed as Gravitation teenage pop star Shuichi Shindou in spandex shorts, midriff-baring top, flared yellow coat, and pink wig (which actually looked better on her than it did on Shuichi in the Gravitation anime), accompanied by a taller guy friend. The latter's well-cut blue shirt and blazer and carefully-styled blond hair actually made him recognizable as a less distant than usual approximation of the love of Shuichi's life, cold-hearted romance novelist Eiri Yuki. The pair were occasionally accompanied by another friend dressed as rock star/recording executive/Yuki's brother-in-law Tohma Seguchi, wearing a fluffy blond wig, a hat, and a long-sleeved shirt topped with a vest.

Other costumes spotted: Two or three girls wearing what appeared to be the uniforms of the high school soccer team whose fortunes are chronicled in the manga Whistle! They all had long hair and otherwise did not look enough like any of the boy characters on the team for me to figure out which specific ones they were supposed to be, especially since I've only read about one and a half volumes of the series.

A group of three girls and one guy wearing identical powder-blue blazers. This, and the fact that the two girls who looked most alike had their (probably hennaed) red-brown hair gelled into swirling points like the Hitachiin twins, led me to surmise that they were supposed to be four of the boys (or possibly three of the boys and the one girl disguised as a boy) from the title
organization in the manga Ouran Host Club. My suspicions were confirmed when a middle-aged woman walking with them at one point exclaimed, "Those Host Club costumes are great! They're even comfortable!"

A woman costumed as Sophie, the heroine of Hayao Miyazaki's Howl's Flying Castle (non-magically-aged version), in a broad-brimmed straw hat, long-sleeved blue velvet dress, and rust-colored shawl — which must have been uncomfortably hot in the ninety-degree heat outdoors that day — with her hair hanging down her back in a thick braid. She was accompanied by a junior high school aged girl and boy (evidently her children, since they kept saying things like "Come on, Mom!"), each of whom was wearing fake fur cat ears and a tail, rather incongruously accessorized with otherwise utterly prosaic-looking summer clothes.