Gurren Lagann’s Kamina set for the LA anime convention this coming July as announced by Aniplex the voice cast person himself Katsuyuki Konishi (see picture inset above).
He’ll also be there to be judge panellist for Kamina cosplay contest as well.
I’m sure they will be plenty of Kamina wannabes out there who’ll love to give this a major thrill!
Just like this one down below.
Not bad at all. Great effort for the Spanish dude’s flawless Japanese dialogues!
Totally rock! ^^
Are some of you guys keen to see some great cosplays in your neighbourhood as well? Or are you planning to do some cosplays yourselves?
Was watching this video clip this morning after tweaking my Twitter settings.
Even though this video was many months old (timestamped on 9th July 2009), I still find it relevant on the fact that Japanese subculture is gaining traction (steadily) in many places around the world, even including Australia and New Zealand. I’ve seen a few around in Auckland for the past few years despite our incredible low ratio of 3000:1.
Have a look and you’ll be amazed. Especially how the otaku specialist said something about otaku gained a bad image after a psychopath killer went on a rampage to kidnap young girls. And then killed and dumped them into a river. The killer was an otaku fanatic…. 0.0.
Also, check out the massive Gundam cosplay video at 5:19!!^o^
Saw this ANN.com post some months ago. And I thought I love to share this piece with everyone.
Japan’s latest wacky robot invention that not only can speak and move recently, but can also – I couldn’t believe it when I first saw this – cosplay and sing as well!!
The new HRP-4C robot model was dressed up as this anime character, known as Miku Hatsune, whose apparently a very popular anime character that seems to be taken a widespread appeal among the Japanese media enthusiasts and raise the industry watchdogs for quite some time.
Never heard much about her. However, according to Wikipedia, she’s a ‘product’ made by music instrument company, Yamaha, that produces synthetic music and singing of various popular songs by actually matching the pitch and vocal range of the actual singers when she started to open her mouth to sing. Really impressed.
Check out some of 80’s popular songs sang by her.
Miku Hatsune singing “Heaven is a place on earth” by Belinda Carlise in 1987
Here’s the original version…..
Miku Hatsune singing “Hard to say sorry” by Chicago
Macross Frontier (MF) are at it again. Now with their new film that’s just been released a few weeks ago, according to this blog, it’s come to dazzle the audience with incredibly stunning cutting-edge animation, wide array of VF-fighter jets flying all over the cinematic screens with its impressive air dog-fight sequences and the mesmerizing story-telling elements by none other than Shoji Kawamori, our legendary Macross director, himself.
Lots of character casts were there for the glorious evening. Shoji Kawamori is amongst the crew.
Following this anime fan’s blog, the entire MF gang were there to enlighten the MF-crazed crowd. You can see them performing the PR stage from the beginning to the every end.
What’s interesting of this blog, as you scroll down the pages while skim reading, you are reading the translated script of the individual voice actors (and Shoji Kawamori) who presented their speeches in front of large audience. This way, you get the rough sense of what they were truly saying while the premier was going on.
It’s sure was a major hit for the crowd during that day!
As you slowly get to know the main voice actors of MF representing the film, there’s one particular (how should I say) star of the show really wowed the audience! And it’s this person’s cosplay as Ranka Lee.
And… IT’S NOT A GIRL!
I just dropped myself dead on the floor laughing hard out how hilarious this turns out to be!!! :)
Apparently, this ‘gentleman’ is a Japanese kickboxer who’s well known in the boxing community, hence he’s pretty butch. And he likes anime too. One of his obvious favourite category in anime is the cosplay. Looking at the above pictures, he’s certainly knows how to get in touch with his feminine side so acutely… :) (He’s also got his own personal blog, if you’re keen to find more about his secondary life as an otaku)
So there you have it folks. The MF movie premier for ya!
Finally, after what it almost appears to be a two-week ‘post absence’, it occurs to me a huge track of time being lost here, due to several inconveniences with the web transfer, I would like to apologise that it sure has taken their IT staff this long to make a 2-5 day transfer exercise, if only they didn’t need that many staff to manage one simple helpdesk request. Only to cause several confusions along the communication lines, making things difficult to get done…
But like everything else in life, that’s life. We just have to deal with it and move on.
And there are several postings I want to share with you. Some I’ve been meaning to do it for a long while before the transfer…
A couple of weeks ago, anime blogger, CartoonLeap, showcased us a great cast of Evangelion Cosplays for the recent Evangelion Movies that turned out this year. Here’s one of his pictures.
Evangelion Cosplays - Image Copyrighted by CartoonLeap.com
Girls sure did a remarkable job in impersonating their favourite Evangelion female characters with such realism. At such near perfection! And figurewise… they’re proportionately accurate as the character’s counterparts. For more photos, check out CartoonLeap’s blog post further! There’s also a poll for you to vote which one of the Eva cosplays would you think turns out the best of the three, if you’re interested.
In entertainment news, with Astro Boy Movie already making its way starting from Japan with its world premiere, IMAGI is setting their major sights on America and Hollywood before it gets released further worldwide on 23rd October (only 8 more nights to go!!). It’s interesting to point out that IMAGI’s major drive to push into the USA movie markets is so they aim to produce higher quality animation that are comparable to the standards of Disney’s Pixar and Dreamworks Studios. Read on to hear what other thoughts that IMAGI and other similar companies have to say with the progression of Asian-based (other than Japan) animation.
With all the crazed hype that is going to build over the next week or so, bet there’ll be plenty of Astro Boy merchandise to buy over the Internet. I’m hoping to see which one of those vendors will provide the best buys for people of all ages, not just applying to just kids.
That’s right. You heard me. To get a job nowadays in Japan for recent graduates, employers must insist that you must have good Gundam modelling skills before they can offer you the job on the paper.
It’s crazy! I couldn’t understand how on earth could they even fanthom a new recruit can only be qualified to fulfill a role if that person has good Gundam-esque modelling skills as part of the psychometric testing?
Is this doable? Can they seriously be rolling out this new approach of candidate screening for any roles’ suitability across any industries of the country? If that’s the case, then we might as well encouraged every student in the whole country to take up part-time Gundam modelling to guarantee their careers as part of the working communities of Japan. This can be anything from
Cosplays
Mum, I want to be advanced weaponry specialist.
Dad, I want to be Gundam undercover agent
to this type of modelling of the odd kind…
Right…. Pink. Definitely a good foundation for aspiring manicurist/dress makers. I wonder where far will they go with this?
Been meaning to post on Saturday evening, however it became such a mission for me to upload the photos on my Wordpress online, I realised this is not gonna be an easy 5 minute job…. And finally here I am.
This is something I dont’ see that often. For the past 15 years since I live in the ‘land of the long while cloud’, anime was word that’s unknown to many general people of NZ and certainly the contrast was incredibly obvious between my adopted country and home country of Malaysia, where anime is seen as a common household product in the neighbourhood of 20 million plus people. Here, to get a manga book was certainly a rarity for these and the closest thing you can ever find them (which I vaguely remember) is from a Taiwanese shop that sells parallel imported goods or from Taiwanese high school friends I used to went out with, and they get the latest trends of manga imports.
Now fast-forwarding the clock 15 years later…. Things have changed. It has changed a lot.
Thanks to the introduction of Pokemon and Dragonball Z into the NZ youth market towards late 90s, the anime space was exploding that was never seen before. It broke all barriers and soon many new young New Zealand fans are spreading the word of ‘anime’ in the community like wildfire. They learn many things about manga, otaku, shonen, doujinshi, cosplay and the culture of Japanese animation so quickly. I feel like I’m no longer a visitor to my new found homeland anymore. Â Everything I do here is almost like being back at home! And what better way for them to get into this pop culture phenomenon, is to have our very own local anime convention centre in the Southern Hemisphere, right in the heart of Auckland City.
It’s probably our first anime convention centre ever in New Zealand’s history. At least, that’s what I found from this link at AnimeCons.com. So New Zealand has come a long way with this and we see a rising number of young fans that mould in very well in this array of ‘Japan-esque’ fun everything from dressing up your favourite anime characters as for eg Sailor moon to owning your very first 1/1 scale Mobile Gundam model! (I was kidding about the 1/1 scale part. Lol.)
Nevertheless, my curiosity for discovering the world of anime in New Zealand never dissipates so I decided to venture out on the quest to see just how much New Zealand as a whole learnt much about anime.
And after the first two hours of almost non-stop (well not really, I had to recharge my parking fare every hour (long story) so I had to rush out and rush back in) photo-taking, and a few hundred of photos later, and countless hours of uploading, here’s the entire album below. Â Broken into 4 categories.
Note: It may take you a while to get used with this photo navigation setup. As you click one of the categories, a screen will refresh and the album disappears (!!) but the link to the gallery is there that says ‘Show Picture list’. Click on the link, you will have the overview of some of the photos previewed. Â There’s an option for you to view the photos in a slideshow format, which is good since I have so many photos and it would be cumbersome to view the individually. Â If you want to see other galleries of the original album, you must click the orginal link of this post so the album gets refreshed.
This is great start for New Zealand. Â As I walked around the room, letting my curious gaze linger from one desk to another, prying on the marvellous artworks by these bright intelligent artists, who clearly show their desire and passion in drawing, I sense something’s good is bound to happen for these talented young guns. Â I asked every person I met on each desk about their age and how long they love to drawing, and you hear the same answer over and over. Â 14-18 year olds love to drawing since they were little kids getting their first drawing pencils and continue to excel their ’scribbling’ into great works of anime/manga art. Â They’re incredible, I tell you. Â (which you will soon see after you look into my album).
They got a number of cosplays going on there from Japanese high-school outfits to one guy dressing up as Vincent, a character from Final Fantasy VII.  Plenty of dances going on too (which I need to find the time to upload, if I’m lucky enough to be busy).  And last, but not least, there’s a section of all mecha toys and models that I could finally find (YES!!!) in our local shores, ie no need for E-bay buying anymore for sure.  Apparently, NZ market is actually small so having a NZ as a young market for youth products like this is a foregone conclusion.  There’s still potential for this before we could rival our so-called “big brother” of the Oceania region and their much bigger show of anime. (see Youtube clip below).
At the end of the day, I did not go home empty-handed, for I certainly did make lot of purchases, if anything not overtly-exorbitant like buying myself a 1/1 Gundam model and put in my frontyard! I’m planning to post this on another page as there’s a lot of great material including magazine of Japan’s wonderful world of modelling hobby.
