It’s been a crazy sleepless weekend for us as we ventured to Toronto to cover it's biggest Anime Con, there -- Anime North. It also happens to be Otaku Aniverse's, first con covered when Eddie Hicks, and Cullen Wilson, with a brief appearance of William Kalynowysh went down.

Day 1

Needless to say we were quite excited to get down there. Maybe a little bit too excited, we ended up getting there at 3:00PM to pick up our Media badges… turns out were we supposed to be there at 4:00. Oh well, we ended up sitting outside of the Media room waiting… and waiting. Thankfully there was a nice sofa right in front of it. Cullen ended up passing the time doing anything and everything annoying. Like making witty comments on everything he saw… Especially the DDR room, which I might add, they had the arcade machine this year. It sucked in basically every person that walked by the room like a black hole. Cullen being someone that hates DRR ended up saying about 20 times “The only good DRR… is the kind that goes into your PC.” (As in DDR RAM)

4:30 ended up coming by and still no Media passes… something is up, seeing how this door was closed the whole time we were here. Turns out, our Media badges were waiting for us at main con office… go figure. But when we got there, we had to wait for the Panellists to check in there… and there was a big line up. After that was said and done, we finally got a hold of our badges and we were off!

We spent a few minutes checking out the whole floor, seeing what was there and planning our weekend, before going off to visit a few panels at 5:00. Afterwards I lost contact with Cullen… plus I haven’t seen William, who said he’ll be there around 5:00. Needless to say I was alone at this point. Just before going to the Opening Ceremony, I said hello to Kat Williams, who had her own stand in the Corporate Area. An area that seemed smaller than I thought it would be. In fact, I was told Bandai was supposed to be here and other companies. Word has it, SARS made them wave the chance to come down here. (Which confuses me seeing how this whole SARS thing in Toronto has blown over sometime ago) So for the most part the Corporate Area was filled with Kat & Neko Publishing, and a few other companies, followed by the Artist Area, which slowly had its influence move in.

After the opening Ceremony I started lining up for the Canadian premier of Alien Nine. It seemed that Read or Die went on longer than it was supposed go on for. During that time, I ran into our Staff Writer William… however my mind was somewhere else. So when he was trying to talk to me I was like “Huh?” It took a while for me to realize what was going on…

After that, Read or Die was starting to come to an end… However, a person to handle the chapter skips for the Alien Nine DVD couldn’t be found. Kat almost drafted me into doing that… but a volunteer for Anime North was found. I ended up watching the last bit of Read or Die to pass the time. Well that, and to let Kat know when it was over… but she ended up coming in right when it ended.

It took us awhile to get the DVD player working, but once it did, Alien Nine was on its way! A few issues came up with the getting the sub titles to work. Once that over with, we were off! Since it was just a showing of Alien Nine, we didn’t get the chance to look at all of CPMs work with it, such as the extras. However we did note that overall video quality was top notch and that the DVD menus were looking really nice! My only gripe was that it was lacking a 5.1 audio track. But then again we knew this already from the information that was given to us a few weeks ago. After Alien Nine, Kat played to the audience (Which was really big at this point, bigger than the amount of people that turned up for Read or Die.) Her Alien Nine AMV, which never got seen last year because it was stolen.  

Around 9:45 the “Whose dub is it anyway” contest started. Basically, they played a scene from an anime, on mute. And someone from the audience had to make up their own lines for what is to be said… It was amusing at first, but then some of them got quite lame… I think the hunger started getting to me at this point.

If it wasn’t for the gift shop/corner store in the main hall, I think we would have passed out. I spent more money there, than in the dealers room) We decided to do like everyone else and order some Pizza… oh the instantly that followed that… lets just say… we were happy the Pizza showed up after waiting so long.

Afterwards, we finished things up for the night in the Shoujo room, where Kat came up and took over the room.  Basically she played what she wanted to play. It was quite amusing; we watched several Shoujo music videos before heading out to watch the last bit of Spirited Away…

Day 2

Having not taken any pictures at all during Friday, (the ones above were actually taken during Saturday) due to the fact that our one and only camera was in Los Angeles with the Gaming Media staff. I made plans to get it in our hands for Saturday. E3 had ended on Friday, and Gaming Media, along with the camera was to be back in Canada in the morning around 10AM. No problem, we decided to pass the time by watching the music videos…

12:15… and still no camera… something’s not right here.

12:45…  Camera finally back in our hands and I was told it was on its way to the con… Now all what’s left is to play the waiting game… It's bad enough that I’ve missed too many chances to take pictures and the awards because of this.

2:00… It seems that the staff still had the camera, and they didn’t quite leave to Anime North with it as I though they did… At this point I was informed they would be taking off now. More waiting for me and walking around for doing nothing.

3:00... Still no camera… what the hell is going on? After yet another cell phone call it seems they STILL didn’t leave for Anime North… I felt like throwing the cell phone out the window… until I realized that it was Cullen’s…

3:20... Camera still not here and too many chances to take some pictures lost… I end up hanging out with Kat. And discovered the huge amount of sales she made during the day.

4:00… The Camera finally arrived! 5 hours late, but its here!

About an hour later we went to the Midorikawa panel… to discover that the batteries in the camera are dead! So I ended up sitting down and watching the event and the hundreds of fan girls getting excited every time they heard his voice. After the event… I lost the staff again… took me about an hour to find them. I ended up having to buy more batteries for the camera, and then handed it off to Cullen to grab a few pictures… I needed a break.

Just before 8:00 Kat revealed she was going to be holding a 5^th anniversary party for being in the manga industry… this is where the fun starts!

My self and a few others ended up becoming her lackeys lifting her equipment, products and closing up her booth for the day. Then we went on a rather assuming journey through the hotel. After dropping off her stuff, we grabbed the snacks for the party and traveled to the room were the party was to be held. It turns out the key she was given didn’t work. This wasn’t too surprising seeing how the room number wasn’t even the right one… Turns out, we were in the wrong tower, the one we were supposed to be in, was the one we just came from! On the opposite end of the hotel!

So we marched back to that tower across the centre, single file of course. We turned several heads as Kat lead an army of people holding dishes of brownies and other snacks… If the Masquerade wasn’t going on at this time, I would have taken a few pictures. But Cullen had the job checking out the Masquerade with the camera. Finally we made it to the RIGHT room… but the keys! Don’t work! Kat took off then, ready to kill someone for messing things up. Then security came up, ready to kill someone, it seems the door wasn’t supposed to be closed to start off with. Or something like that. About 15 minutes later, we got the door open and the party was on… until we discovered someone didn’t leave us a VCR to watch some videos.

The best we were able to get our hands on was a 13” TV with a built in VCR… better than nothing. We spent the night watching various j-pop music videos, some Shoujo-ai openings, music videos and just relaxing. Around 11:30 we started packing up.

I ended up running into the staff after that. Cullen didn't seem to impressed with the Masquerade. Never mind the fact that the camera's batteries died again during the Masquerade. (I knew I should have bought more than two batteries!) Jordan revealed that he was to battle his friend in a massive game of Tao Fang for Xbox. The winner walks away with the Art of Capcom book. The loser walks way with Yu-Gi-Oh cards… Jordan lost the first too matches, one more loss and it’s over… suddenly he made a come back winning two more. The Score, 2-2. Final match… And Jordan… loses! And after all that work he put into making such a huge come back.

And that was it for Day 2, we would have stayed for more, but Matt was kind enough to buy us tickets to Matrix: Reloaded… we spent the last bit of the night watching that.

Day 3

I got next to no sleep since Friday night; I found it hard just to get out of bed… in fact we didn’t even make it to the con until after 12:00 because we were so tired. There wasn’t much to do this day, except for our interviews with the Guests of Honour. (Which we'll post later) That however ended up going longer than we expected, we ended up missing the Shoujo Otaku Insanity Test!

We then ended this con by taking a few last minute pictures and then attending the closing ceremonies. Overall, we enjoyed this con quite a bit; there’s was quite a bit of things to do. My only issue was the lack of industry folk this year, and that Kat’s name wasn’t exactly mentioned during the closing ceremonies. Apparently she raised about $200 for the Kids help Phone. Other than that, we were impressed and had a lot of fun overall with what was seen. Looking forward to next year!

-- Eddie Hicks, Otaku Aniverse