seiyuu3

Everytime I go to one of these events, it is a unique learning experience.

houkoholic and I were at TAF for two reasons. Horie Yui (mine) and Tamura Yukari (his). I’ve always wanted to go to a seiyuu event that isn’t a concert or live singing. It’s a chance to see a different side to their work. This also seemed like a good opportunity to get an impression on the anime fair.

We arrived at the Big Sight relatively early, about 40 minutes after the opening. We’d managed to get advanced tickets on friday so getting in didn’t take long. The crowd was definitely less than Comiket which made it all the more pleasant.

After getting our tickets stubbed and walking past the sign reading “No Pictures” we headed straight for the special event stage to check out the seating arrangement. The main event (for us) was at 12:40 and not for nearly another 2 hours. Most of the seats were already taken and we assumed that the seating would be cleared after each event during the 20 minute breaks. This was a mistake.

The plan was to come back at 11:50 for the start of the マリみて event, wait for that to finish and get in line early for the かしまし event. In the meantime we checked out the various booths around the main stage and did a quick walk around the fair.

Many major studios were there promoting upcoming anime that would be hitting our screens in the coming months. Two good pieces of news were announced earlier in the week. Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex would get a new installment, “Solid State Society“. And Kyoto Animation announced that they would redo Kanon to the visual standard set by Air. Other things I discovered during the walkaround:

• Ghibli seem to have a new work by the name of 「ゲド戦記」
• Prince of Tennis live action movie will roadshow this summer
• More .hack is on the way
• 10 years later Eva is still going strong
• Blu-ray doesn’t offer much quality advantage for anime

We arrived back at the event stage to a much larger crowd hanging around the entrance to the seating. A much, much larger crowd. The seating was already full. Could all these people really be here for マリみて? We waited in the crowd discussing the possibilities while the マリみて event started. It became evidently clear that while some of the crowd was here for this event, most were not. Cursing our inexperience, I still held out hope that they would clear the seating before かしまし and we would still be able to get a decent spot. This was a wrong assumption as well.

At the end of the マリみて event only a few (say 20-30 or so) exited the seated area and then the line crush to get in began. Luckily, we had managed to get in before they shut the gate again. Finding seating was impossible however. Whatever empty seats were left had already been taken or reserved by other people’s bags and jackets and we were shuffled into a standing gallery on the right side of the stage. This wasn’t too bad. We were close to the front albeit at the side and there was a couple of taller guys in front. However if they stood in the right way, the view was pretty close.

The event itself was pretty short. 15 minutes of it was taken up by 「ゼーガペイン」 a new release from Bandai. The other 15 was of course かしまし. This was headlined by the 3 lead seiyuu for Kasimasi. 植田佳奈 (Ueda Kana), 堀江由衣 (Horie Yui) and 田村ゆかり (Tamura Yukari). The MC would ask them opinions about various elements of Kasimasi, none of which I paid a great deal of attention to as I had to constantly shift to get a good view. This turned out to be worth it as Yukarin, not paying a great deal of attention to the MC either, kept looking over to our gallery. This meant that Yui too, would occasionally glance over at us, as she kept turning to chat to Yukarin during the entire event. Unfortunately photos were a bit of an impossibility.

The event closed with ゆうまお performing the ending theme 「みちしるべ」. We cleared out of there right after they left and so did 70% of the 1000 person crowd. Which goes to show how much draw seiyuu can bring to an anime or event.

We headed over to the Aniplex booth to try to catch Nakahara Mai as a bonus for today, however the crowd was once again crazy. After some more wandering around we decided we’d had enough of fighting the crowd and it was time to bail and call it a day.

For now, I’ll keep watching Kasimasi. Though the initial episode was rather cringeworthy, there are some promising elements to the story as it seem to make a genuine exploration of the relationships between the 3 main characters.

This entry was posted by sent on Monday, March 27th, 2006 at 01:37 and is filed under アニメ, イベント, 堀江由衣, 田村ゆかり. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.