Each year, I emerge from under a rock to travel to the Anime Convention, and every year, something happens that throws me for a loop. This year, it was the OV-Chipcard becoming obsolete, prompting me to find a replacement. Bus journeys could now be paid through OVpay, using a banking card in combination with the OVpay app, installed on a smartphone, or via the 9292 app, also installed on a smartphone. The Android version on my ancient phone was too old for either app, so, after trying in vain to run the OVpay app in an emulator on Linux, I admitted defeat, installed the emulator BlueStacks on Windows to run the app, and registered a card with this app shortly before the trip. I later discovered that the OVpay app is not necessary for OVpay to work, it just keeps track of one's trips. We live and learn.
Another new thing this year: Urban Hotel Golden Stork. Previously, I had a choice of Bastion Hotel (near the con) and Best Western (near Rijswijk station); this new hotel was halfway in between. It boasted "industrial chic", meaning the visible pipes and half-painted ceiling in my hotel room were intentional. Claiming to bring people from all corners of the world together, it also had lounges boldly decorated in primary colours, which I forewent as my two goals were "watch anime" and "sleep". In the room was a brochure of what dishes could be ordered from the restaurant next door, which I thought meant room service, but which meant that guests who wanted to eat in the restaurant could order ahead; the only thing delivered to the room (but to be paid for at the cash desk in the restaurant) was different flavours of pizza, which, once my own food stash had run out, I gratefully accepted. I can't remember buying anything at the con's food stands, since lines were long and my legs were feeble.
By now, the con has settled into its new and leaner post-COVID pattern: three announced films, a bonus fourth one, episodes of whatever anime a European company is advertising, and literally all sorts of lectures, workshops and performances that are either Japanese culture or nerd/fantasy culture. The function of introducing new, promising or obscure anime series to the Dutch public has been taken over entirely by streaming services. The holes this leaves in my watching schedule are agreeably filled up by MangaKissa Corner, a cosy corner library of translated manga that I'd never even noticed until last year. Having previously watched the Skullface Bookseller Honda shorts, I read the four volumes of manga these shorts were based on, the last one covering the author's trip abroad, as she no longer worked at the comic store, but her series was so popular that her publisher demanded more.
And speaking of anime being advertised, Hunter x Hunter is still a hot item, opening the con with sample episodes, and closing it with a full-length film. By the creator of Yuu Yuu Hakusho, it follows the same formula: introduce chipper main (juvenile) character and friends, start with general adventure eps to illustrate the main cast's characters, then follow up with arc after arc after arc of arena fights. Quite literally so in the Hunter x Hunter - Heaven's Arena arc, where "Heaven's Arena" is a towering combination of hotel and fighting rings, each storey a fighting level, and our young hero has to win his way to the topmost level: an arena on the roof, sticking out above the clouds. His friend in this arc is another, more sullen minor - isn't it funny how anime's martial arts champions are always of schoolgoing age? - whose technique is to incapacitate his opponent with a single blow. Given that the contestants fight to amuse the audience, it's amazing that this buzzkill hasn't been kicked out yet, but because he tried to attain the top level before and quit because he was "bored", he WILL be kicked out next time he loses or skips a battle, as the woman at the hotel desk sweetly tells him. He almost loses a fight against yet another youngster, who starts to collect dark clouds around him, only to be rebuked by his teacher. Questioning the teacher, who at first fobs them off with a nonsense explanation, and a scary encounter with an invisible, crushing force in a hotel corridor, leads to the discovery of "nen", a potent technique that has to be studied patiently for years, or - as the collection of deadly freaks and invalids on the top floor can attest - it will destroy body and mind; but of course the heroic duo gets fast-tracked.
Given the many activities offered by the con, I thought I'd try the RPG "Extra Lives", where outcomes are decided by the (majority in the) audience, rather than the dice; but it required a mobile phone, and mine is ancient, and also at home, on the other side of the country. So I had an extra hour to kill before Overlord: The Sacred Kingdom.
To recap: disobeying a server-wide call to log out, online MMO gamer Momongo finds himself trapped in his character, an imposingly armoured skeletal lich called "Ainz Own Goal", amidst his "evil" servants, that include the virginal succubus Albedo who absolutely dotes on him; and tries to make a name for himself, to attract the attention of his fellow gamers, by doing good deeds and sheltering the helpless. (Overlord, seen at AnimeCon 2018). In the sequels (Overlord II and Overlord III, shown at AnimeCon 2019), he extends his sphere of influence by saving a village and taking in "evil" creatures like goblins and ogres, protecting them against the aggression of other warlords.
At some point, this noble lich will run out of conventional villains to fight and underdogs to add to his admiring horde, but fear not: in Overlord: The Sacred Kingdom, just as the guards around a large Lawful Good settlement are commenting how quiet it is, and one starts talking about his daughter who became a knight, rather than an archer like her parents, a demon materializes in front of the pope/empress figure who protects this place, brushes off her holy attacks with ease, and smashes her face into the ground, then disappears with her, leaving the royal bodyguard gnashing her teeth. Another demon, as skinny as the previous one is bulky, waits for its allies to arrive - various beast-man tribes, and leech-faced humanoid worms - then attacks. A detail to remember: when the leech envoy turns up, the demon says "you took your time" and cuts it down.
The settlement is overrun. Desperate, but with great distaste, the royal knights turn to an unlikely ally: Ainz Own Goal, who agrees to slay the big demon and possibly find the abducted monarch, on two conditions: that he not be involved in other battles, because he needs to save his energy for the big fight, and that his reward shall be the demon girls that the big brute has bound in service. In previous films, these girls belonged to his staff, so the trip to the conquered settlement seems like a double rescue mission. It turns into a triple rescue mission, because he also takes under his wing a smallish girl who is constantly, literally, kicked around by her superior; the daughter who wanted to become a knight, and who is, after the storming of her settlement, an orphan. In addition, despite having expressed "count me out of any sidequests" before accompanying the knights, he ends up saving people left and right, and the brave little knight girl, who he gifts a number of artefacts, helps the leech-folk, who only joined the demons because their royals are held hostage, to free their crown prince; the other abductees are beyond saving. After the decisive battle, the teeth-gnashing bodyguard is even angrier, the little knight has turned zealot, extolling all to worship Ainz Own Goal, the demons reveal that this was all a ploy for power, and the Sacred Kingdom is shown to be rotten to its very core.
That was Friday's film. Saturday's film, for which I had to sit through the end of a Dutch Digimon dub, was Laputa, Castle in the Sky. I saw this film at Anime'99, but this time, I also saw the full intro: a slideshow of woodcut-style images, a voiceover narrating a past where civilization took to the clouds. Summed up, a poor boy who works in something like a coalmine in the Alps meets the girl who dropped out of a military blimp chased by air pirates, but is saved by the magical necklace that makes her float rather than fall all the way down. An old war machine is revived and seems to recognize the girl, the pirates who chased them become their allies, they rediscover an island in the sky; generally speaking, mayhem ensues. Funny, poignant, magnificent, it's a classic worth rewatching.
Saturday boasted two films: the announced title in the morning, and the bonus film late in the evening. I killed the hours between by attending a shinobue flute performance and a reading titled "Pumpkin Queen's Tales of Terror". The flute music ranged from traditional to popular, which was a bit lost on me, as I don't know anything about popular music in Japan. Pumpkin Queen, in purple witch outfit, basically does live audio books for dyslexics. Opening the thick, bookmark-riddled tome of Edgar Allan Poe's collected work, she read "Masque of the Red Death" in a solemn voice with a slight Dutch accent, so I often couldn't understand her; I've noticed general problems with understanding the spoken word, and much prefer written text, but I know how the story goes, so I just huddled and enjoyed the atmosphere in the increasingly chilly and darkening pop-up tent.
The bonus, Howl's Moving Castle, is also a Miyazaki film, apparently Studio Ghibli's debut, based on an English novel - "Howl" is actually called Howell - again in an alpine setting. Sophie, who is plain, especially compared to her glamorous sister, is still working in the family's hat shop when said sister tells her to meet in town. She's not too plain to attract unwelcome attention from some uniformed guards, but is saved by a handsome young man who not only takes her by the hand, but levitates the pair of them to the balcony of the building where she should meet up. Background buzz has it that Howl's moving castle is in the neighbourhood. Beware of Howl, he will eat your heart! I've seen enough anime gore to take that literally, but in this case it just means he likes to impress and then ditch young women, breaking their hearts.
When she returns to the hat shop, a flowy diva figure emerges from a sedan chair carried by shadows, looks around the shop and sniffs disdainfully. Sophie pointedly says that the shop is closed, for which impudence the billowy witch casts a spell on her that makes her old. Since this is a heroine from an English novel, and not an anime bimbette, she doesn't scream at this turn of events, but pretends to have a sore throat when her sister (or mother?) calls her next morning, after which she slips out unseen to set off for the unhospitable wilds where magic users live, to find one that will lift the spell. Being so old is rather a drag, and tired as she is, Sophie tugs on a branch sticking out of the ground, intending to use it as a walking stick; but what she pulls up is a whole scarecrow. To thank her, the scarecrow leads her to a huge moving contraption with steps trailing from under its belly. She manages to mount the steps, open the door and enter the warm interior of Howl's moving castle, where Calcifer, the burning spirit that occupies the fireplace, offers to lift her curse if she can free it from Howl. Who is on remarkably good terms with Calcifer, coming home from work to bake an omelette and tossing the eggshells in the mouth of the spirit, who greedily devours them. Sophie announces that she will be Howl's housekeeper. As the castle rambles around, she gets to know both this vain, spoiled, troubled wizard, who never once recognizes her as the young woman he float-walked away from pushy guards, and Michael, his young apprentice, who, every time he opens the door to a caller, slips on a fake beard to look old and venerable.
Instead of summing up the story - said to differ from the original in that there is a war on, Howl works as a kind of battlemage, the abducted wizard Suliman is the royal mage and pursues him like a criminal for being bonded to a spirit, and the billowy witch is not killed, but loses her magic powers and joins the household as a genuinely old woman - I'll describe the delight that is the moving castle. On the outside, it's an enormous steampunk metal monster on legs, chimneys on top belching smoke, and balconies and mechanical bits'n'bobs sticking out from all sides. Inside, like a Tardis, it's bigger, with a living space built around the fireplace, a messy kitchen, a very messy bathroom - as the new housekeeper, Sophie has her work cut out for her - and rooms filled with bookshelves and magical stuff. Once, when she tries to follow Howl after he can't quite transform out of birdshape and flees into the heart of the castle, she crawls down a burrow running through a colossal hoard of colourful toys.
Although the castle lumbers around in desolate hills, its door has a wheel of four settings above it, each setting seamlessly connected to another door somewhere in town. It is to these town doors that messengers come and letters are delivered. After the royal mage sends the troops after Howl, these connections are severed, and the soldiers who beat down the doors find nothing but empty space behind. Howl uses the move to rearrange the castle interior, shaping it into that of a spotless, luxurious house. It's Calcifer who has to muster up the energy to maintain all this living space, and when, at the end of the film, he falls ill and the castle has to run from new threats, the rooms fall away one by one until all that's left is a tiny platform on legs, that would have slipped and fallen into a ravine, were it not for the scarecrow's stick used as a brake.
And the scarecrow is the missing prince. That's all I'm going to reveal.
Shown on Sunday morning, Naruto Shippuden - Tale of Jiraiya the Gallant arc is blissfully free of Naruto. It is full of the mixture of slapstick and drama that makes Naruto so popular, though. The eponymous hero has been tasked by a human-sized toad sensei to go to the villains' base, on his wooden sandals that slip off at awkward moments, where he is assisted by two roughly toad-sized toads on his shoulder, who are wise and powerful village elders, but spend most of the time arguing about banalities while the hero is trying to make a grand entrance. Even his toadly helpers can't defeat the group of swirly-eyed psionic evildoers, in which he recognizes former dojo pupils led astray, and one of their last actions is to rob him of the power of speech, so he writes a message on one of the toads' back, to take to his sensei, before he dies. Which is when he's revealed to be the person who raised infant Naruto, making this arc a prequel.
Between this and the con's third film, I attended the workshop Kaiju Cutie: How to Make a Hit Indie Animation out of general interest, paid close attention, then promptly forgot everything as I am not an animator, as opposed to the attendee who responded to the maker's opening question, whether there were any animators present, with "umm, I dabbled in some animating software", to which she firmly said: "Then you're an animator." The very short Kaiju Cutie, a hit on Youtube and possible first in a planned series, was made partly to show that you don't need a huge studio to produce animation, although it took a lot of work, and a tiny bit of help from a fellow professional.
Hunter x Hunter: Phantom Rouge the Movie does not contain fights in arenas. Hooray. There are still fights, but it's more like a whodunnit. Like, literally, who stole Kurapika's eyes.
Retracing our steps: Hunter x Hunter starts with Gon, the infant prodigy who effortlessly passes all the tests to become a Hunter. Also passed: Kurapika, last survivor of a clan whose eyes glow red when he becomes angry, and Leoriko, a cynical doctor. All members of Kurapika's clan had these red eyes; they were massacred by the Phantom Troupe to collect the eyes, which are apparently worth a fortune. Imagine Kurapika's surprise, when a living member of this clan approaches him; his blind childhood friend Pairo, no less! Somehow, magically, Pairo spirits Kurapika's eyes out of his head. Gon, Leorio and a later addition called Killua, find Kurapika unconscious; safely put to bed, he sees via his stolen eyes a man with a spider tattoo, the mark of the Phantom Troupe, the band of villainous nutcases created as antagonists for the Hunters. Gon and friends use Kurapika's visions to trace the thief's hideout and travel there as "tourists". On their way, they watch a puppet show by a street performer. This young boy, who is actually a girl, who is actually a puppet... Not to spoil too much, she's connected to the eye-stealer, who is too much of a nutcase even for the Phantom Troupe.
Thus ended another con, and concludes another write-up, mere weeks before the con of 2026, best described as "Miyazaki Galore".
