Displaying items by tag: anime expo 2018

This year’s Anime Expo at the Los Angeles Convention Center saw the return of a musical performance by virtual idol Miss Monochrome presented by SHOWMAKER. SHOWMAKER is a virtual stage creator app that features Miss Monochrome. Continuing from our interview from last year, we talked a little about the current state of SHOWMAKER as well future plans with Producer Yoshihiko Katagiri and the voice of Miss Monochrome, popular singer and voice actress, Yui Horie.

Tsume Art is a high end collectible statue company from Luxembourg. Fans of popular series such as One Piece, Dragon Ball, and Naruto will definitely recognize their iconic showcase pieces that features an insane attention to detail. Most of Tsume Art’s products are made to order in super limited production runs and can only be obtained from their online webstore akin to other high end manufacturers such as Sideshow Collectibles. Due to the exclusivity of their products, Tsume Art is not as well known in the United States. 

Learn a little more about the company in our video of their booth at Anime Expo 2018!

On Friday, July 6, Anime Expo hosted the second of this year's Anisong World Matsuri concerts at Microsoft Theater. This one would be the Japan Super Live and composed of the lineup of Aimer, Yuki Kajiura, May'n, and Senketsu Girl Sayuri. We at t-ono.net had a few of our staff attending the concert and decided to hold a round table discussion with our thoughts. 

First debuting solo in 2008 as “agraph”, Kensuke Ushio is a Japanese composer with three albums so far. Ushio and other members also helped form the band LAMA in 2011 with NAKAKO (iLL/ex. supercar), Miki Furukawa (ex. supercar), and Hisako Tabuchi (bloodthirsty buchers/toddle). As a solo musician artist, Ushio has created music for various popular anime series and movies such as Ping Pong the Animation, Space Dandy, Devilman Crybaby, and A Silent Voice. Along the way Ushio has also done remixing, producing, commercial music, and has continually created musical works in varying fields. While Ushio was at Anime Expo for the US premiere of Liz and the Blue Bird (Liz to Aoi Tori), he was able to spend some time with us for a short interview.

Cells at Work! is a manga series from Kodansha that has been adapted into its own anime series by Aniplex. This series is unique in that it takes the work cells inside the human body and reimagines them as human characters. The cells are shown doing their daily task but in the manner, humans would do such tasks. The talented Kana Hanazawa, and Tomoaki Maeno lend their voices to Red Blood Cell and White Blood Cell respectively. During Anime Expo 2018,  Aniplex held a panel for Cells at Work! to premiere the first episode of the series days ahead of its official release. Aniplex also invited special guests Tomoaki Maeno, Yohei Ito (Kodansha Producer), Nobutaka Kasama (David Production), and Yuma Takahashi (Aniplex Producer) for a Q&A at the end of the panel.

Anime short films are a rare breed but while there can be too many cooks in the kitchen, in the case of Flavors of Youth it works. Much like a three-course meal, the first film Hidamari no Chōshoku (Rice Noodles) is a great appetizer. The main course Chiisana Fashion Show (A Little Fashion Show) serves as the strongest peak by far, and Shanghai Koi (Shanghai Love Story) is a sweet little dessert to finish off. The Chinese idiom (衣食住行) that states the four basic necessities of life: food, clothing, housing, and transportation serves as a tagline, and to be fair, each of the three shorts does a good job of sticking to their assigned part. However, the theme that weighs most heavily all three shorts is the inexorable passage of time.

Anyone familiar with anime has encountered the yuri genre at some point. For the most part, Yuri is about girls being in love and falls into three categories. First, there is the kind of yuri that merely hints at lesbianism as a sort of phase for young girls. The second is the kind that exists for male titillation. The last is the rarer kind of yuri that actually tries to portray true-to-life lesbianism. Kase-san and Morning Glories falls into this third category. It had existed as a manga before a chance encounter with director Takuya Sato, who was so impressed with the work that he spent two years making Kase-san and Morning Glories his passion project. The result is a film that is faithful to the original work of Hiromi Takashima and a revelation for anime films.

Check out some of the awesome cosplays around the floor at this year's Anime Expo 2018!

It’s been a year since the US release of Fate/Grand Order, the highly successful mobile phone game based on the Fate/Series. The game has taken the country and world by storm with a daily revenue estimate of $1.3 million dollars in the US alone and is ranked the #1 Top Grossing Role Playing game on Google Play. What better way to commemorate than with a 1 year anniversary panel at Anime Expo 2018 with special appearances by Ayako Kawasumi, the voice of Type-Moon’s poster child Altria Pendragon, Satoshi Tsuroka, the voice of Arash from Fate/Grand Order and Gil de Rais from Fate/Zero, and Yosuke Shiokawa, the Creative Director of Fate/Grand Order!

If you ever wondered what a pure, unfettered Mari Okada anime would look like, Maquia would be the first chapter in a work that is undeniably her own. For those who have never heard of Mari Okada, she is a longtime series composer/screenplay writer that often refined or assisted in the stories of others. Notably, Okada worked on Anohana and Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans, but Maquia marks her directorial debut while retaining control of the script.