Today, I arrived at AX later than yesterday because I there wasn't much that I was interested in going to see until around noon.

I started the day by checking the Exhibition Hall again looking for Utena season one. In that, I was unsuccessful. I did however manage to not buy anything else either, so that might be considered a victory of restraint.

Afterwards, I went to the Aniplex industry panel. They mainly showed off trailers of things that I'd already seen, but the main thing that suprised me was finding out that Guin Saga had been licensed. They didn't come out and say who had licensed it or even announce that it had been licensed, but they did show an English-language dub of scenes from the first episode which makes it seem almost certain that the show has been licensed given the incredible cost of dubbing.

At that point, I had about 1.5 hours to kill until the Morning Musume concert and there were no panels that even seemed remotely interesting. Instead, I went to a screening room where they were playing the first 4 episodes (00 and 1 through 3) of Haruhi. When I had originally watched Haruhi, I found it interesting and fun and enjoyable but didn't quite get it. I didn't really see why it was as popular as it was. However, rewatching episode 00 and 01 made me realize how brilliant the whole thing is. The 00 episode doesn't make a damn bit of sense the first time through, but seeing it now, it seems brilliant given the understanding of what is actually going on. Maybe it is the sort of thing that requires two passes...

Then came the Morning Musume concert. It was fine. I had a good seat (last row of the left-center-front section). However, I'd say that their style sort of brushes up against the edge of what I generally like. I found them nice enough to listen to, but tended to sort of wander off mentally while they were performing. I suppose not everyone can be The Pillows.

I grabbed some food and then went to the preimere of the Evangelion movie. It was...Evangelion. It was also dubbed, which I wasn't expecting, though the dub was competent. The main thing the movie seemed to have up on the series was an extreme lack of still-frame silence time. All of the angst is still there, compressed into the two-hour format of a movie, of course. The film itself didn't cover the entire series and is probably closer to maybe 6-8 episodes worth (at least if the fact of them making four movies is important). They've updated all of the Evas themselves with conspicuous CG. It isn't clear to me that this is an improvement. Also the movie did not introduce Asuka, which seems strange given her relative importance to the series. They referred to her offhandedly a few times as the "third child" being "trained in Germany", but she got no screen time.

Ultimately, Evangelion is Evangelion and if you liked it before you'll probably enjoy the movies since they've basically cut big swaths of filler. Also, the movie looked like it did a fair bit of animation recycling, but it's hard for me to say definitively since it has been something like 5 years since I last watched Eva (in contrast to the Gurren Lagann movie where I'd seen it like 4 months ago).

Once Eva was over, I decided to call it a day because there was nothing else on the schedule that I cared about.

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