Anime la Expo (Part 1)
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Anime la Expo (Part 1)

By Chengyi L

IT’S ANIME EXPO AGAIN!!! (The following post contains unmarked spoilers from Kill la Kill. I’ve tried to avoid the super important spoilers, but please consider yourself warned.) As a refresher, Anime Expo is a four-day-long anime convention held at the the LA Convention Center every July 4th weekend. As per last year’s post, I won’t be using any real names; I’ll be using the names of the characters everyone’s cosplaying as instead. A friendly guide for those of you who haven’t watched Kill la Kill:

Last year, I mentioned that Anime Expo sometimes has famous guests from the anime industry visiting it because it’s so big. Well, this year, we’re getting visitors from Trigger, the animation studio that made Kill la Kill! Sushio, the character designer and lead animator; Kazuki Nakashima, the script writer; and Yosuke Toba, the producer, will all be coming to Anime Expo. I sure hope our cosplays are up to snuff…! Day 0

Last year, we spent n+1 hours waiting in line on Day 0, but a friend who went at 7:30am to the line on day 1 got out in about an hour… We decided to skip the line for today to finish our cosplays (or, in my case, help my friends finish their cosplays.)

Our Ryuuko cosplayer was actually stuck at a wedding and couldn’t join us until Saturday. What a shame…! Day 1 I was planning on queueing up for my ticket as early as possible, but people were slow at waking up and getting dressed, so we ended up getting to the line at 9:30am ish. This was a bad idea.

After more than 3 hours later, we finally got inside! Whoo! To my surprise, there was a poster on the back of the Anime Expo map, drawn by Yoshinari Yoh (awesome animator at Trigger; director of Little Witch Academia; animator of several Kill la Kill episodes, including the final one)!!! This poster suddenly made the whole line seem worth it.

But there’s no time left, because there’s a Studio Trigger panel at 6pm. This means we have to be in line for the panel by 5pm. This means we need to start putting on our cosplays by 4pm. Since some of us haven’t actually finished their cosplays yet, we also needed a few hours to slap everything together.

So we budgeted an hour for everyone to eat lunch/whatever, then it’s time to head straight back to the hotel to finish the cosplays.

**Protip: Don’t procrastinate. Seriously. ** Instead of eating food, I used my lunch break to snag a Little Witch Academia poster from the Trigger booth in the Exhibition hall.

We arrived 1 hour before the panel and we already ended up in the second overflow room…

The panel is an unofficial Trigger event ran by Hiromi Wakabayashi (creative officer and writer for episode 4) and Tatsuru Tatemoto (PR representative and interpreter). The panel was mostly those two people leaking information about the upcoming Studio Trigger shows without their boss’s permission and general tomfoolery (the Japanese twitter translators of Ninja Slayer showed up in blinking visor glasses.) At the end of the panel, Tatsuru passed out prizes to people who spoke up during the panel or cosplayed – even though he didn’t bring enough for everyone, somehow everyone in our cosplay group who attended ended up getting a prize!!

While getting our prizes, Wakabayashi seemed very impressed by Iori’s tentacle arms, and the fact that my costume glowed. Tatsuru also suggested that I show my costume to Sushio, because Mako is his favorite character. Maybe if I’m lucky enough to meet him… ;A; Afterwards, I played miniature ping pong with some random cosplayers (refereed by a Ping Pong cosplayer) before being dragged off to dinner by Nonon.

Overall, a good day. I still can’t believe that we got all those Kill la Kill prizes (especially that key frames book…) WAY STATUS: [ ] LOST[X] NOT LOST

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