Anima Alley

Cultural Fusion

In the convention center, people were a crossover of their ethic origin with other foreign cultures; a white woman dressed up as a Japanese game character, Chun-Li. An Asian dressed up as American comic character, Catwoman. A black woman dressed up as a Japanese comic character, Naturo. American and Asian comics were sold at the exhibition. I didn’t talk to them, but I did some research later on and wasn’t able to find anything about this subject.

I saw a elder who seemed like sixty-years old dressed up, three little children dressed like characters: a boy dressed like Sweeney Todd, a boy dressed like Link and a girl dressed like Zelda. They looked so cute, so I asked their mother for the permission and took a photo with them. Even though there was a large variation in their ages, they had a common interest.

Collaboration

After that, I went to the Anima alley. It was located on the top level of Javits convention center. The celling and wall were composed of windows, and the sunshine could shine into Anima alley. However, it was raining on that day, so I only could only see the dark clouds through the windows. In the Anima alley, there were a lot of tables and a lot of professional cosplayers sat there. They were professional because their motivation, dressing, tone of voices, and poses were just like the characters. Most of cosplayers were formed in a group with friends. They dressed in the same branch of Anima or Manga to show their teamwork spirit. There were also some people cosplaying with their lovers. Some parents dressed their children like Anima characters.

As soon as I stepped into the alley more deeply, there were a lot of cosplayers chatting with others. Some cosplayers carried large broad weapons and chatted with people for a long time. I was curious if those people felt tired or not. I saw a group of cos-players dressed like Naturo characters. The other group dressed like One Piece characters. Suddenly, someone suggested to take a picture together. Therefore, they made a “versus” pose with each other and took a meaningful, funny picture.

After that, I saw a group of wried people who wore similar costumes. They wore large foam-helums, hold foam-shields and plastic weapons as a group of foam-robot.Their costumes’ differences were color only. I thought they created their own costumes because I‘ve never saw those dressing before either in Amine, film, video game or Manga. When visitor asked them to take a photo, they set up a funny group pose, and shouted out their group name.