Hi guys, it's been an exhausting but fruitful day spent at the inaugural
Animation Asia Conference (AAC) in
Suntec Singapore. I was there from 9am today till around 5pm, listening to the various industry speakers, as well as catching the media preview of the celebrities — singers Ichirou Mizuki and May'n, cosplayer Kaname and director Mamoru Hosoda — who will grace Anime Festival Asia (AFA) 2009.
I've got a ton of raw notes that I'd eventually cobble together into coherent copy (unfortunately, chances of it getting published are exceedingly low, but I'm doing it for passion, so I don't really mind). The AAC's theme was the "globalisation" of anime, and the speakers spoke along three distinct "tracks":
Create,
Manage and
Engage.
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Under the
Create track, we had Mr Mamoru Hosoda describing how he came up with the concepts for
The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and for his latest release,
Summer Wars. We also had Singapore-based Edmund Shern, chief executive of Stormlion (and founder of graphics house
Imaginary Friends Studios), discussing how his fledgling studio was picked by Production I.G to collaborate on their planned
Titan Rain project.
My fanboy moment was in seeing Mr
Mitsuhisa Ishikawa of Production I.G in person. He looks quite stern, in pictures as in real life, but seems approachable enough — if you speak Japanese
From hearing him speak, and from his demeanour, you do get the sense that he's a no-nonsense producer. But, at the same time, he appears to be the kind of guy who'd go all out to work with you,
if he believes in you.
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The
Manage track was, in my opinion, one of the more enlightening segments of the conference. Particularly because of the business insights offered by Mr Phoon Chiong Kit, deputy chairman of Imagi International Holdings, the firm that took over the reins of
Astro Boy after the original producers ran out of cash. Mr Phoon is your real-life "suit", the "villain" that all anime fans and creators love to hate. But through his presentation, and through speaking briefly with him during a break, it's clear that he's a very canny businessman (not surprising, given his background as an investment banker, and as a former managing director of mega entertainment group
Golden Harvest) who well understands the difficulties of managing creative talent.
Forget your stereotypes about high-ranking movie industry executives — such people are very much more complex in real life than you'd at first think. And also very funny and witty. A product, I sense, of a lifetime of experience in nurturing highly risky projects that don't always succeed despite how hard you try — you eventually learn to laugh off the failures, learn from them, then move on to the next project.
The next speaker was Mr Shiro Sasaki, chief executive of Flying Dog Inc, the firm that produced the legendary soundtracks of several hit anime series, including
Macross Frontier. His presentation was
very good, very enjoyable and very informative. He explained the thought processes that went into making anime music a "character" of its own, and how his firm carefully nurtured then-unknown voice talents into the now big stars behind characters Sheryl Nome and Ranka Lee.
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There was then an industry "showcase", where a few regional anime studios pitched their projects to the Japanese studio executives in attendance. To be sure, I thought this segment was very poorly managed, and I sometimes felt sorry for some of the studio representatives, who were completely overshadowed by the big-budget glitzy presentations of Madhouse and Production I.G.
Heads up: If you're going to the AFA, look out for the booths of Border (Malaysia) and Tuldok Animation Studios (Philippines). I personally think they've both got some interesting talent worth looking into (watch out for Border's concept of combining batik art with anime design). Hopefully, they'd manage to attract the attention I think they deserve.
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Finally, there was the
Engage track, where blogger Danny Choo described how he built his website on all things Japanese into a social-media portal, with big potential for turning user-generated content (he calls them Consumer Generated Media, or CGM) into revenue streams.
To be sure, Danny didn't cover anything particularly "new" (especially if you're already familiar with his portal,
Dannychoo.com, which is quite good, just not to my particular tastes). The social-networking phenomenon is already very well understood here, in AnimeSuki, for example. His presentation was, in effect, a sales pitch for his portal's social-media functions and tools. Danny was joined later by Mr Vince Shortino, president of Crunchyroll Kabuki Kaisha (that is, Crunchyroll's full-time headquarters in Tokyo), during a panel discussion. Prior to that, Vince, too, had a presentation, which he also used to pitch Crunchyroll as a viable,
legal platform for distributing anime outside of Japan.
Their pitches should be fairly familiar to most of you, so no need for me to rehash them in detail. I think their platforms represent the future of anime distribution and marketing, but this isn't really "news" to most of us any more.
Now, the
really fun — and, in my opinion, the best — presentation of the whole conference was delivered by Mr Kotaro Sugiyama, head of solution (strategy) / creative department at Dentsu Inc, one of the three organisers of AFA 2009.
Mr Sugiyama went to great lengths to demonstrate what he called "Toyko Innovation", that is, the process of "releasing anime characters from the frame and into real life".
Basically, this translates into highly innovative advertising campaigns that cleverly leverage on anime brands to create "stories" that "engage" fans and consumers, allowing them to interact with their favourite anime characters. Mr Sugiyama then made the bigger point of how this is the future of advertising: It has become a form of "storytelling" in itself. Advances in technology and social-media make this more possible than ever before.
He presented some of these examples of highly successful ad campaigns built around anime brands:
Life-sized Gundam at Odaiba
Ultraman Honda
There were another two case studies — one of a
Slam Dunk fans-appreciation campaign by mangaka Takehiko Inoue, and another campaign involving manga posters in the form of
QR codes — but, unfortunately, I can't find those clips on YouTube.
Moving on, Mr Sugiyama presented the award-winning
Big Shadow (2006) ad campaign for Xbox360's
http://www.xbox.com/en-US/games/b/bluedragonxbox360/ video-game.
Big Shadow campaign
Finally, after presenting a clip of the
Uniqlock desktop service, Mr Sugiyama presented this extremely lovable ad that is totally unrelated to anime, but which uses the concept of "Tokyo Innovation" to exemplary effect.
Love Distance
In summary, Mr Sugiyama effectively demonstrated how Japan is serving, once again, as the world's "early adopter" of post-industrial concepts (a trend apparently first noted by sci-fi writer
William Gibson) — to create not the manufactured products of old, but the storytelling services of the future.
To extrapolate from Mr Sugiyama's vision, I would say that all this presents completely new possibilities for anime and manga brands. Entirely new classes of ancillary products — which involve high levels of user interaction — could be created in the future, either to be sold directly, or to serve as "storytelling" devices that would encourage fans and consumers to spend in novel ways.
And that, could become
very relevant to rights owners in the future, at a time when their traditional sources of income, DVD sales, are steadily declining because of Internet competition.
As Mr Phoon said, it's high time for both the movie and anime industries to think of ways to further segment their markets. In his opinion, it would be far more productive for producers, marketers and distributors to think of ways to monetise streaming or pay-per-view channels, for example, than to continue fighting the losing battle of defending their DVD markets.