Anime Expo 2024
One of the great benefits of living in Los Angeles is that there are so many big annual events that happen right in the city. We’re home to the Oscars, the Grammys, countless film festivals, and the biggest anime convention in North America: Anime Expo. I’ve been going over a decade now, and it’s always a crazy experience.
Held at the Los Angeles Convention Center in downtown, this massive 4-day event is packed with panels, screenings & countless promotional booths for all the latest shows & movies. While the long lines to enter the convention were certainly more manageable this year, AX was still packed with thousands and thousands of anime fans, many dressed in Cosplay. The most common this year were characters from “Frieren” and “Delicious in Dungeon,” two of the biggest shows of the past few months.
Here are some of the major panels I managed to attend, after many hours of waiting in line:
— Warner Bros. Japan presented the trailer for “Batman Ninja vs. Yakuza League,” the sequel to “Batman Ninja.” This was followed by a video message from the director, writer & character designer. We also watched the English dub of Episode one of the new show “Suicide Squad Isekai,” which was followed by a live performance of the End Credits song “Go-Getters” by V-Tuber Mori Calliope.
— Toho presented a behind-the-scenes look at hit shows “Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End” and “The Apothecary Diaries” with many of the creators present, including both directors, and “Frieren” actor Nobuhiko Okamoto, voice of “Himmel the Hero.”
— Netflix presented a first look at their upcoming show “Terminator Zero” from Production I.G. & Skydance. Showrunner Mattson Tomlin talked about his love of the Terminator films and his approach to adapting it to an anime TV series. We saw the first scene of Episode one, followed by a video breakdown by director Masashi Kudo.
Of course, there were many more panels I wish I could’ve attended! Toho also presented a look at “Spy X Family” and “Kaiju №8,” and Gkids screened the first episode of the upcoming Science Saru show “DAN DA DAN” coming this September. Sometimes panels overlap, so you just have to choose, and sometimes the lines were incredibly long. Saturday was especially overwhelming.
But the best panel I saw was from background artist Yoichi Nishikawa, who has worked on some of the most beautiful anime films of the past 20 years, from “Howl’s Moving Castle” to “Wolf Children” to “When Marnie Was There” to last year’s “The Boy and the Heron.” I’ll elaborate in a later post about everything he talked about.
Of course, what you really want to do at any convention is buy stuff! Compared to when I first attended in 2013, there are definitely fewer vintage merch sellers, so finding rare, out-of-print collectibles is more difficult now. But I was still able to find booths selling anime DVDs, CDs, Laserdiscs & even VHS!
And finally, you can’t leave Anime Expo before saying hello to Totoro & the CatBus, which are located at the Studio Ghibli booth. The booth was busier than ever this year, thanks to exclusive merch from The Boy and the Heron!
