June 8-10 2012

AnimeNEXT this year was interesting this year,  but not because of itself.   Earlier this year at Katsucon we became aware of another convention in Ohio,  Colossalcon.   We heard a lot of chatter about it from the competing cosplay community that they were going there and it was hosting a WCS preliminary.     We weren’t  sure about how it would effect Animenext  until we got there.   This year we missed the press deadline so we didn’t cover the masquerade or panels and mostly ran around taking photos.

From the start some glaring problems were made immediately apparent that they lost a building and weren’t able to use space previously used in past years, we were told the management broke contract and didn’t allow AnimeNEXT to use it.  Only until Sunday at the end of the con did I find out there were severe hotel management problems from one of the hotel security guards.  Friday was pretty uneventful and normal, at night people hung out in the lobby as people tricked in for Saturday.  On Saturday however, the crowd was different that previous years,  over time you get used to seeing familiar faces and a lot of them were missing, the crowd was younger but at least attendance seemed to be normal.    But attendance does not make a convention.  For Main Events, the big room, nothing was scheduled until late afternoon, as a first event a fashion show was scheduled.  Nothing anime related.  A Fashion show.  We  attended that and ran to the front to take photos.   So programming on that standpoint was severely lacking.  At night we usually have fun doing late night photos, but we realized it wasn’t going to happen.  The younger crowd was all gone in their rooms or went home for the night.  The normal late night crowd was at a different convention.  We didn’t even hear complaints of people not wanting to wait in line for the rave.  So definitely a change with the lobby being empty at 10PM on a Saturday night.  On the bright side on Sunday, we heard many of the new people that this was the greatest convention they’ve ever been to.  So hopefully in a couple years they’ll start to breathe life back into this convention.    Can we say we’ll be back to this convention?  Of course.  Its one of the area conventions we’re based from.