Today, I made a trip up to the city to attend the gallery opening of Stella im Hultberg's new show, Silent Spring at Gallery1988 SF. I arrived there to take a look at the paintings and sketches before the huge crowd started to fill the gallery; even on a rainy Friday evening, there were at least 75 people inside the gallery when I left.

I spoke to Stella before I left, complimenting her on a wonderful showing, and thanked her for doing a show in San Francisco. Stella was both amazed and impressed by the crowd, and seemed appreciative of all the fans who came out tonight.

On one wall were large oil on canvas paintings, while the other featured ink and oil paintings on tea stained paper.

All the pieces for the show can be seen here.

Comic Book Artist Paul Pope has been enlisted by DKNY to design a future forward collection called 2089, which envisions the style of New York City in 2089:

One of my favorite Disney movies is Lilo and Stitch, which has a great combination of great writing, humorous characters and heart. The franchising of Lilo and Stitch has not fared so well; while the tv show and the followup direct to dvd movies have done well money-wise, the storytelling and comedic aspects of these efforts have suffered. The news today is that Disney is developing a new Stitch property fills me with both anticipation and dread. Developed jointly by Disney and Toei Animation's Madhouse (The Girl Who Leapt Through Time) and titled "Stitch!", the setting has moved from Hawaii to an fictional island in southern Japan (very similar to Okinawa), and introduces a girl named Hanako as Stitch's new sidekick. Madhouse has managed to produce some great anime series in the past such as Deathnote and Dennou Coil, and contributed to the Animatrix in the "World Record" short.

Each panel in Hall A is split between two presentations, giving each presentation about a half hour to show the trailers/bonus material, and then time for a question and answer session. Howard Berger of the Prince Caspian Special Effects department was there to answer questions.

This panel began with the showing of the trailer, which included some incomplete CG shots -- the CG critters were smoothly rendered without the application of fur or hair, and the centaurs were just wireframes.

Questions in the session included "Do you hope to make them all?" (Yes) and which is your favorite character (Mr. Tumnus). Most of the post-production work is being done in New Zealand by WETA, and they're still working on finishing the movie.

For Wall-E, Andrew Stanton of Pixar "came all the way from Emeryville" (across the bridge, basically for all those who are not familiar with Bay Area geography) to show us the extended trailer of Wall-E, as well as three clips from the movie: Wall-E shows Eve his truck, Wall-E leaves Earth, and Wall-E on Eve's ship.

Talking about Wall-E, Stanton said that the inspiration for Wall-E came from Luxo Jr, the animated lamp in the first Pixar short, and also from him playing with binoculars at an Oakland A's game, in which he realized that you could attach emotion to the movement of the binoculars --happy, sad, happy, sad. Someone asked whether Johnny Five of Short Circuit had any influence on Wall-E's design, and the answer was that he saw the movie once. When designing Wall-E, Stanton said he didn't want a humanoid robot for Wall-E, he wanted a machine. The design of Wall-E was dictated by Wall-E's function; the box for his body is because he needs to compact the garbage, the treads are so that he can move over obstacles, and the eyes mainly came from the binoculars.

When asked what kind of story Wall-E is, Stanton replied "It's a love story", and hearing the crowd reacting with groans, he added "it's a good one!".

Wall-E is not intended to be a True-3D film -- the first one that will be is Toy Story 3.

Stanton said that he was totally geeked out working with Ben Burtt, who did most of the sound effects for Lucasfilm, who is now at Pixar, making sounds for Wall-E. Look for Pizza Planet in the first 20 minutes of the film, and John Ratzenberger has a speaking role in this film as well.

Last year, when I went to Japan, we visited Roppongi and saw this giant sculpture of a spider.

Since War of the Worlds had been released the previous year, I overheard people who believed that perhaps this was a movie tie-in. I knew this probably wasn't the case as Martian war machines have three legs, but I took photographs of the sculpture, and then forgot about it, until I recently saw this photo taken in London:

Thirty-five foot tall spiders made out of bronze aren't something you see everyday, but this time I had more information. The work is called "Maman", and the original one made out of stainless steel is located at the Tate museum at London. The sculptor is Louise Bourgeois, and there are six bronze full-size castings of her work located at:

• National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
  
• State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg
  
• Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
  
• Mori Art Museum, Roppongi, Tokyo
  
• Samsung Museum of Modern Art, Seoul
  
• Havana, Cuba
  

A visit to Prada's website reveals a short movie (accessed by the Japanese character for film on the top of the page) of Appleseed: Ex Machina, and along with clips of the film, also reveals a couple of clothing designs by Prada used within the film.

Appleseed: Ex Machina has chosen to go with a very CG looking art style, one that could be classified photorealistic anime, much like the Final Fantasy series.

The Haruhi dance has become something of nerd pop culture, and now some intrepid person has sourced and cut together footage from around the world to showcase otaku from around the world doing the Haruhi dance:

There's also the study abroad student doing the Haruhi dance in various locations in Japan:

For comparison, here is the original animation upon which all other Haruhi dances have been based:

I've previously written about the lines on Day 1 at Anime Expo, and the fiasco that required a roundabout path through the convention center. The number of attendees at this year's Anime Expo was tallied to be about 44,000 throughout the four days. That is a remarkable number of people, but when compared to the chaos that is the San Diego Comic Con (with 123,000 people attending), one does wonder why AX is an experience that leaves a lot of attendees and guests dissatisfied.

The Queen of Akihabara, Haruko Momoi had some criticisms of the management of Anime Expo this year. She was invited from Japan as a guest to perform a concert, attend some panels and sign some autographs, but felt that guests weren't being treated respectfully, and that fans weren't being treated well, she had her autograph signing sessions cut short (or in some cases cancelled altogether), and nearly had her concert canceled too. A fansite of Momoi has a much more detailed account from a diehard fan's attendance of the events.

I attend quite a few conventions annually (APE, WonderCon, FanimeCon, San Diego Comic Con), and I don't think I've ever seen a convention as poorly managed as the Anime Expo of 2007. Long Beach Convention Center is a nice facility, and the Long Beach Arena are nice places for events, but without being able to cut through the corridors and hallways makes doing a convention at Long Beach in the middle of summer a bad choice.

With lots of good restaurants located in the area, one wasn't starving for food, and I'm sure the Long Beach businesses appreciated the 40,000+ otaku descending upon their city in search of meals. I'm sure the City of Long Beach would love to have us back, but if AX is held at Long Beach ever again, I'm quite certain that the fans won't be back.

Many major distributors of anime and manga were no-shows at Anime Expo 2007, which was surprising; at the very least they had a panel, even if they didn't have a booth, but no reps from Viz or Del Rey? TokyoPop was there for a very brief time to present their new releases, but gone are the days of having a Hachiroku sit on the convention floor or giving away bags and preview books.

The Long Beach Arena had a rather draconian policy in place regarding cameras, food and drinks -- they didn't allow them and they wanted to search bags for them. In a convention setting, this is a practically impossible task; just by going to the con you receive a bag, and the no food and drink policy seemed to only be in place such that their concession stands could charge outrageously for food and drink. Lemonade in the arena? 5 bucks. Shaved Ice or rather, crushed ice that had frozen into an ice block where all the food coloring had run together into a dark brown color, was 4 dollars. I didn't take a close look at the food concession stand inside the arena, but I noticed that they were selling pretzels and maybe hot dogs? No question of a very large and very healthy profit margin there, especially given the fact that there was a very large of turnover between the shows at the Arena. The bag search and the patting down of attendees definitely turned me away from the first event held in the Arena, the S.K.I.N. concert, and made me apprehensive of attending all other events in the Arena.

My problems with AX have more to do with the Long Beach Convention Center Staff than the Expo organizers -- AX Staff and Volunteers that I met with during AX2007 were generally responsive and helpful, Long Beach Convention Center Staff (people in the Yellow Shirts and the Suits) were simply rude and clueless.

While I had some issues with San Diego Comic-Con 2006's Day 1, making us walk all around the convention center, things seemed to have sorted out as the Con got fully underway. At AX2007, I kept hoping things would get better, and they did, a little, the pat down and bag searches were soon nothing more than cursory looks, and eventually they did open up the back walkway (which still sucked, but at least you didn't have to go up and down 10 different flights of stairs -- only 2).

All of this, of course, has me looking forward to the San Diego Comic Con which is likely to be three to four times as many people as AX2007, but at least they know how to run a proper convention, and the city of San Diego respects the convention goers. Of course next year, Anime Expo is moving to the Los Angeles Convention Center. The Staples Center is a mild improvement, but the complaint about the area is that there aren't enough food choices, and parking and traffic is a mess down there. Hotel lodging is a mess down there, with most of the large hotels being located miles away from the convention center.

The Production I.G. started off with a film that one of their interns had made while working at Production I.G. a few years ago which detailed the inner workings of the studio, and featuring overworked animators.

One of the things that they recently finished was a commercial that they had aired once in Japan to make it eligible for the Cannes Film Festival:

The showed off the new Maaya Sakamoto video for "Universe":

The other announcements had to do with their upcoming series:

Sisters of Wellber

Reideen

Sky Crawlers (short teaser - something they threw together quickly for the announcement)

Seirei no Moribito (Guardian of the Sacred Spirit)

There's still a few weeks to go before the release of the live-action "Transformers" movie, but it seems that some fans have taken it upon themselves to using the new Alternators line of Transformers toys to create a stop-motion animated short: