The Anime USA Convention was held in Crystal City this past weekend, featuring Japanese traditional crafts, cultural symposiums, and cosplayers dressing as their favorite manga, anime, and game characters.
The event occupied much of the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Crystal City, creating a world in which the anime aficionado could see characters transported from two-dimensional manga and anime—that is, Japanese and Japanese-inspired comic books, graphic novels, and animated films—and brought to live in 3-D reality through elaborate costuming (“cosplay”). Yet there is so much more to the anime convention, with everything from an entire room dedicated to the most fabulous assortment of every board game imaginable to reconstructions of lost vintage video games. Discussion panels were also featured on topics such as how some older anime game titles have been lost due to poor management of the underlying computer source code.
In addition to gaming, cosplay, and discussion panels, there were free arts and crafts classes for the artistic visitor. One activity involved doll-making, and there were informative guides on the art of kimono, including yukata, a simplified summer kimono. There were also public art displays of manga sketches penciled out by very skilled convention attendees.
Manga and anime share a long history, one which many trace back to the woodblock prints of Japan during the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Both artforms have produced a number of famous artists, such as the award-winning Junji Ito, who works with Japanese classical themes as well as Western literature; Ito has, for example, produced a graphic novel of Mary Shelly’s “Frankenstein” (appropriate for our current season of Halloween!). Referencing literature as well as history, the world of Norse legend is presented in such works as Makoto Yakimura’s “Vinland Saga,” which focuses on Leif Eriksson’s explorations in coastal North America more than 1000 years ago.
Indeed, at the recent convention, Norse mythology took center stage as panel presenter Brent P. Newhall, a self-styled twenty-first-century renaissance man, presented “‘Genshin Impact’ as Norse Tragedy: Mapping the ‘Nibelungenlied’ onto the Fall of Khaenri’ah.” Here the doom of Siegfried, the revenge of Kriemhild, and the defeat of Brünhild through trickery from Icelandic mythology are paralleled to events in the anime game “Genshin Impact,” not unlike how these medieval Icelandic cultural elements entered German art and literature during the 1800s in works such as Wagner’s “Ring” cycle of operas.
We then met many cosplayers, including a woman named Lily portraying the character of Lynette (also from “Genshin Impact”) and, later, three persons cosplaying Himeno, the Devil Hunter Kishibe, and the Control Devil Makima, all from “Chainsaw Man.” The latter is a game and manga series following the manga trope of henshin, or metamorphosis, in which an individual has the ability to change into someone with superhuman powers and strength. We also met a cosplayer dressed as Jill from “Final Fantasy,” a game/manga which falls into the manga genre of isekai in which an ordinary person is teleported into another world, there becoming a hero. Many of the cosplayers identified with the characters they played for personal reasons, but several said that their costumes also helped them to locate fellow fans of particular book and film series.
The anime convention was not only limited to manga but included other forms of animation and fantasy as well. We encountered everything from Charlie Brown, from the American “Peanuts” newspaper comics series, to Sophie Hatter, from Studio Ghibli’s “Howl’s Moving Castle.” Indeed, cosplayer Avery from Sterling, Virginia, presented a familiar cloaked figure to fans of Victorian literature: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Avery reminded us that the annual Anime USA event serves as an opportunity for all to come and connect through cosplay and self-expression. The assemblage is clearly a costume designer’s dream and offers new ways to see the world.
While the Anime USA convention has come and gone for 2024, we warmly recommend a visit to, if not participation in, this event next year, currently scheduled for October 10-12, 2025, again at Northern Virginia’s Hyatt Regency Hotel in Crystal City. Fair notice to future cosplayers everywhere and in all anime realms!
