3 Day Badges purchased this month are only 37.00!  Tickets are on sale now, but make sure you order yours before Midnight on February 29th!

Kyle Hebert is a Los Angeles-based anime and video game voice actor whose credits include Ultimate Marvel Vs Capcom 3 (Ryu), Naruto (Kiba), Bleach (Aizen, Ganju), X Men Arcade (all male voices) and Gurren Lagann (Kamina).  He is best known as the Narrator and Teen Gohan from the Funimation dub of Dragonball Z.  Other notable roles include Soul Eater (Masamune), Ouran High School Host Club (Kazukiyo Soga), Fullmetal Alchemist (Vato Falman), Tales of Symphonia (Richter Abend) and Star Ocean (Dias, Arumat, Crow).  Kyle also provides voices in numerous video games including Final Fantasy XIII, World of Warcraft, Devil May Cry 4, Dynasty Warriors, and Resident Evil 5 .  He writes and voices all the promos for filmmaker, Kevin Smith’s Smodcast Internet Radio.  He also provides private online voice acting critique sessions for beginners.  For more info, visit www.kylehebert.com.

Please down load the appropriate Registration Form below. There is one for Single entries, and one for Group Entries. You should fill it out at home and bring it along with your visual references to the Costume Contest Registration and Prep panel on Saturday at 12:00pm. You will be assigned a Pre-Judging appointment for Sunday. Pre-judging will be from 10:00-11:30am in the Workshop Room.

3-Day attendees are asked to register at the Saturday Panel. A few slots will be held for those attendees with Sunday only wristbands. Sunday only attendees who wish to register for the contest may come to the Workshop room during Pre-judging hours to register.

AFO Costume Contest SINGLE Registration

AFO Costume Contest GROUP Registration

Legendary pioneer voice actor Peter Fernandez has passed away due to lung cancer this morning at the age of 83. Most of you may not know Peter Fernandez but you most likely know of the works he was involved in.

In the early days of anime, shows such as Tetsuwan Atom and Tetsujin 28 were brought to America as Astro Boy and Gigantor respectively. Peter worked on the staff for the dialogue and voice direction for those shows. He was also Lupin III at one point in his career.

His most well-known accomplishments were his roles as the voices of both Speed Racer and his brother Racer X in the 1960s cartoon and he even composed the English lyrics for the show’s famous theme song.

Our thoughts and prayers are with his family.

Source: ANN

As a voice actor, Sonny is considered to be one of the most recognized voice actors in the business. Besides Dragonball Z’s Krillin he has worked on many popular animated characters including Maes Hughes from Fullmetal Alchemist, Usopp from One Piece and Cartoon Network’s laid back, robot host Toonami Tom. He has also worked as a writer and director on several TV series including Dragonball Z, Case Closed and Lupin the Third.

As a comic book artist he has 17 published works to date including his débuted self-published series Mr. Average featured in The Comics Journal and Elfquest which was published by both WARP Graphics and DC Comics. Sonny is considered one of the top Elfquest artists from its over 30 year history.

In 2007, Sonny wrote and illustrated a graphic novel about a reluctant punk rock, faerie princess named Goat. The book, called We Shadows, was published by Tokyopop and was nominated by The American Library Association for Best Graphic Novel in 2008. The book received glowing reviews in many trade magazines including Publishers Weekly, Newtype, Play and Anime Insider.

Currently Sonny is reprising his roles in both the new Dragonball Z and Full Metal Alchemist series and plays the title role in the Xbox game S’plosion Man. Sonny also began illustrating Marvel Comic’s sketch cards recently for Rittenhouse and fetches ebay prices up to $800 per card for his depictions of Marvel’s superheroes.

There are very few films that stay relevant more than 20 years after their original release. That statement is certainly more accurate with science fiction films that have left several generations of adult nerds disappointed with the lack of hover boards, flying cars, and time machines that were predicted to happen in those classic films of the eighties.

At the same time in Japan, a science fiction revolution was happening in anime. Works were becoming more serious and the production values of films were rising greatly thanks to a booming Japanese economy. The defining anime film of the late eighties was not only depicted a more feasible technology-driven future, but also provided a plot and many themes that are still relevant to this day. That film would be the epic known as Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira!

In the world of Akira, building of Neo Tokyo on an artificial island has long been finished after the original city had been destroyed over 30 years prior at the beginning of World War III. It has been believed that old Tokyo had been destroyed by the being known as “Akira” and believers, dissatisfied with what the city has become after rebuilding had ended, now pray for his return.

While this is going on the citizens of Neo Tokyo and the press show their discontent for tax reform blunders and a terrorist resistance has been formed to take down a government secret project. This secret project, which relates to the Akira incident, exists within the government to perform studies and experiments on human subjects to learn more about the powers that Akira once possessed. (Whether to prevent such destruction from happening again or to harness such power as a weapon remains to be seen.)

With government dissension growing, gang warfare is also on the rise. The film starts with a stunning scene of two motorcycle gangs- the Capsules and the Jokers -riding through the streets of the Neo Tokyo metropolis while they violently attack each other in a bloody battle. During this battle, Capsule member Tetsuo gets into an accident in a government restricted area and is taken away to a undisclosed location to be studied and experimented upon when it discovered that he possesses mental frequencies similar to Akira.

Meanwhile Kaneda, the leader of the Capsules and owner of the sweetest motorcycle in fiction, is arrested along with the rest of the capsules but is freed when the police determine that they have no ties to the terrorist resistance. Ironically, Kaneda becomes enamoured with a young girl Kei who is a member of that resistance and joins the group once he finds out that they are trying to rescue Tetsuo.

Overtime, Tetsuo’s powers manifest and become extremely volitile and now the goverment and its other espers try to subdue only for his to break loose and reign terror on Neo Tokyo. It is now up to his once best friend Kaneda to stop him once and for all!

Akira is a visual and audio masterpiece. With over 160,000 animation cels featuring highly detailed futuristic architecture, fluidly animated action scenes, and lip-synced facial expressions animated to match pre-recorded voice acting(a first for anime), Akira still looks better than most of the anime coming out even today!

For the score of the film, Otomo was searching for a sound of the future that would mix the style of the eighties with what music may sound like in 2019. With those goals, he enlisted the group Geinoh Yamashiro Gumi who constucted the score(before Akira was even animated) using ethnic instruments, synthesizers, sound modules, and the power of the human voice. It makes for a distinctive soundtrack not heard in anything other anime or film.

Akira is a milestone in anime. No question about that. It has not aged at all and has only become even more relevant given the current chaotic situations that are currently happening around the world. There are some older anime fans that would state that you aren’t really an anime fan until you have seen this movie. While such a statement sounds rather elitist, that doesn’t make it any less credible.

Akira originally came to America(via Streamline Pictures) at a time when animation was still viewed as “kids stuff.” Few people thought that animation could be so sophisticated in both it’s art and it’s themes and story; however, when Akira was released in the states, that idea was challenged greatly and anime, then called “Japanimation”, would be viewed as adult animation for years to come until anime became more mainstream and diverse in America.

Whether or not seeing Akira is required to call yourself an anime fan, you should definitely see it. It’s a fantastic movie that only comes once in a lifetime and defines a whole generation of anime.

To give this review an anime twist, Genndy Tartakovsky, of Samurai Jack and Powerpuff fame, designed some of the action sequences in the new film.

Furthering the anime twist, Studio Madhouse is making an Iron Man anime later this year.  Obviously it can’t fail to be an Anime We Love, here is the trailer: