Judging Anime

I have friend who will be judging for the first time at a smaller convention. She's too shy herself to post the question here. She thinks she can handle doing workmanship judging, but still would like some tips.

What she's really nervous about is presentation judging and would like some guidance on how do that. Especially when a large percentage of the entries are anime based and she's not into anime. Thanks, John O'Halloran

Richard Man
For workmanship, I think the #1 rule is "do not compare what this person does to what *I* can do..." For someone not familiar with Anime, while some constructions may seem WTF or "simplistic," remember that they are trying to recreate drawings with floating whatever here and there for the simple reasons that the artists draw them that way. The best Paine costume I ever saw has the poor girl not able to sit down at all!!

For a presentation to be a good, it must say something interesting or meaningful to the audience, even if they have not seen the anime. In fact, with so many animes and mangas out there, even anime fen would not recognize a good number of entries in anime cons. So don't worry about the anime aspect too much, but - is it a good presentation? Do the audience enjoy it? etc.

FWIW, of course, I have never been a judge, only married to one.

Dany Slone
When I did presentation judging at Anime LA, I knew SOME of what crossed the stage, but not all of it. In some cases, I asked questions of my judging counterparts about the premise of what was going on so that the little lightbulb could go on in my head. So that may be something that she can do if something comes up that doesn't make sense. There is so much anime out there, it's hard to keep up on all of it.

Also, listen to the crowd. If the crowd reacts well to it, I tend to realize someone onstage is doing something right in the eyes of their peers. Not to mention, as what was said..in the best cases, you don't have to know the characters to be entertained.

I'm sure someone can add to this, but what here's a list of the costume stuff I've seen the most of during my anime dabblings. If she's feeling up to it and has an hour or so, she could probably look these up in Google images:

Final Fantasy (especially Advent Children of late, though could range the entire series of video games)
Naruto
InuYasha
Full Metal Alchemist
Bleach
Princess Mononoke
Howl's Moving Castle
Resident Evil (Video game, but like Final Fantasy, it's Japanese-based, and seems to pop up often)
Hellsing

Hope that helps a little bit. I'm sure someone can add to the list.

Karisu
Maybe it's because I come from an SF/F con background in the first place, but in my personal opinion as a judge, if a presentation even at an Anime con is not generally accessable on some level to those in the audience who are not familiar with the source material, it shouldn't help the presentation. A skit full of Naruto in-jokes is only really funny to Naruto fans. (Now a lot of the audience may be Naruto fans, but I'm not, and I don't think I'm the only one out there.) The main character of Naruto (and possibly some of his silly signature behavior) is generally pretty much recognizable by most Anime fans, but for those who don't watch it, the secondary characters are more obscure.

I have seen really nice dramatic and also humorous presentations though, which I enjoyed quite a bit, despite pretty much only recognizing by name the Anime or videogame source - ie: the presenters made their presentations accessable. :)

If the audience members start having conversations as the presentation goes on, this usually means it has gone on too long and lost the audience's attention span (a common problem at Anime cons.) I know most Anime cons give longer time limits, but it seems that some people don't realize they don't NEED to go on that long if their presentation can achieve its goals in a shorter time. (When asked for advice about presentations, I always try to recommend "sound bites" and "think about the length of an average TV commercial".)

Any idea of "original costuming" having possible any edge over recreation costuming needs to go out the window for Anime cons. Anime costuming's main focus is recreation costuming based on artwork. This does not mean that there can't be creative original or artist-style-inspired interpretations of existing characters, though, which can be quite nice. :)

Lastly, at Anime cons one may expect to see the "bathrobe and bunny ears" type of costume presentation, where the costumes are often thrown-together and the intent of the presenters is really to get onstage and show off a skit. I don't think a solution has really been worked out yet in the Anime masquerade world about mixing this type of "talent show" presentation with those which are intended to feature the costuming.

Kevin Roche
The Instructions to Judges we wrote for Anime Los Angeles are still on their website with the masquerade rules (Scroll to the bottom of the page.)
http://www.animelosangeles.org/anime-la/2006/EventMasq.php

As of May 23, 2006.

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