With Anime Weekend Atlanta being my ninth and final convention of 2018, one might think of it being just another job for me, but AWA and I have a long history, and I still consider it to be my major annual convention. With some last-minute additions to the schedule, I pulled out all the stops to make all seven of my panels to absolute best renditions so far and had a stellar time. Nothing quite brings me back to the nostalgic days of my early fandom like AWA, so to pass the torch on and provide quality content to a new generation of fans is very important to me.
Here are the playlists and general outlines of the panels that were title-heavy. For my other ones, well, you’ll just have to attend the next time I present them.
Trigger Warning: The New Hotness of Studio TRIGGER
This panel is a pretty simple overview of Studio Trigger; no follower of their output would be surprised by what I showed, but for those of you just now discovering them, here are the people and titles we talked about:
- The old guard: Hiroyuki Imaishi, Yoh Yoshinari, Masahiko Otsuka, and Ishizaki Toshio (“Sushio”)
- The “newer” faces: Akira Amemiya, Hiromi Wakabayashi, Shigeto Koyama, and Takafumi Hori
- Little Witch Academia (and The Enchanted Parade)
- Inferno Cop
- Turning Girls
- Kill la Kill
- When Supernatural Battles Became Commonplace
- Ninja Slayer From Animation
- Sex and Violence with Machspeed (Part of Japan Animator Expo)
- Battlesaurs
- Black Dynamite (2nd Opening)
- Steven Universe “Mindful Education”
- Kiznaiver
- Space Patrol Luluco
- Little Witch Academia TV
- Darling in the Franxx
- SSSS.Gridman (next month!)
- Promare (2019?)
Older Anime For New Fans
When a new fan asks for recommendations for shows to watch, they invariably get inundated with everyone piling on their favorite shows from their childhood, and while a lot of good stuff does get recommended, it tends to be stuff with an older aesthetic that doesn’t hold up as well as one would like to believe. In this panel, I recommended a few series that are both classic and still work for a modern audience. Here are the titles referenced in the panel—to hear my justifications, you’ll just have to attend the panel when I run it again:
- JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure
- Serial Experiments Lain
- Revolutionary Girl Utena
- Project A-ko
- Urusei Yatsura
- Giant Robo
- Record of Lodoss War
- Megalobox
- Cowboy Bebop
Before Devilman Crybaby: The Wild Worlds of Science Saru
I’ve got to admit, I was a little surprised to see most of the audience so well-versed in Yuasa’s work already, but like for TRIGGER above, let’s put the list down for reference:
- Chibi Maruko-chan
- Crayon Shin-chan
- Noiseman Sound Insect
- Mind Game
- Kaiba
- The Tatami Galaxy
- Kick-Heart
- Adventure Time “Food Chain”
- Space Dandy (Episodes 9, 16)
- Ping Pong the Animation
- Lu Over the Wall
- The Night is Short, Walk on Girl
- Devilman Crybaby
Beyond Miyazaki: Anime Creators You Should Know
Again, as we said in the panel, this list was not meant to be exhaustive, but included in the most relevant and important anime creators in 2018 that we felt all anime fans should be aware of. The exclusion of any of your favorites was not meant as a slight—we just only had an hour to present this panel!
- Isao Takahata
- Makoto Shinkai
- Sayo Yamamoto
- Satoshi Kon
- Mamoru Hosoda
- Mari Okada
- Rie Matsumoto
- Studio Trigger
- Kyoto Animation
- Science Saru
- MAPPA
As always, I would be very grateful if you could hop on over to Facebook and provide us with a rating a review on our official Page; while I would love to get 5/5 stars, I’d prefer you be honest! If you still have the mobile app installed, please go back and rate us there, and once AWA releases its feedback survey in a week or two, please mention us there if you enjoyed our content.
If you want to keep up with what we’ll be doing in 2018, both at conventions and online, you can find Third Impact Anime on Twitter, as well as my personal Twitter.
Thank you all for making AWA special as always!
Third Impact Anime 