I had the awesome opportunity to attend the inagural Animation Asia Conference 2009 which was held today at the Suntec City theatre, and got the opportunity to hear what some of the most prolific personalities from the animation and related media have to say on the topic of “Globalization of Asia’s Soft Power”.

Mr Tsuguhiko Kadokawa [角川 歴彦], Chairman and CEO of Kadokawa gave the keynote speech on how Japanese content are being spread all over the world with globalisation.

The most anticipated segment was when Mamoru Hosoda [細田 守], director of “Summer Wars” and “The Girl who Leap Through Time” came onto the stage. He gave some interesting insights on how to create anime blockbusters, and he shared that he is a big fan of Hayao Miyazaki since elementary school and was subsequently inspired to produce anime. For a young director that created two successful blockbusters, I thought that he was very modest. Folks can still catch him during his interview segment on the first day of AFA09 (11am-12pm).

Next up was a session whereby StormLion announces their latest collaboration with Production I.G. – Titan Rain. The CEO of Production I.G. was also present (fourth from the left), and he was an interesting guy that spoke with lively gestures.

Mr CK Phoon then came up on stage and shared some interesting insights on distributing the recently released adapted animation of Astro Boy in three different countries: China, US, and Japan. He was a great presenter and shared that the movie was received very well in China but performed poorly in US and Japan. He then ran though why the movie was a hit or miss in each of the country.

Shiro Sasaki, CEO of Flying Dog then share with us how music sountracks can injection new dimensions of storytelling into an anime series. His company is quite impressive and manages talents like May’n, Fiction Junction and Maaya Sakamoto. He shared on why they had decided against using well-known singers in the anime series Macross Fronter. By using a relatively unknown singer, fans would have the better experience of beliving it was Sheryl Nome singing to them instead of some well-known singer like Madonna.

Soon it was mid-afternoon, and time for some yummy grub. Many folks also took the chance to network and exchange business cards.

After lunch, DannyChoo got onto the stage and did a great presentation on his mirai platform and consumer generated media. Thanks to his exciting slides on oppai mousepad and itasha, nobody fell asleep.

Mr Kotaro Sugiyama, Senior Vice President, Head of Solution (Strategy) / Creative Department, Dentsu Inc then came onto the stage and shared with us some of the amazing marketing campaigns that were conducted by Dentsu. I was quite amazed to find out that they were the ones responsible for conceptualising the Life Size Gundam and Honda x Ultraman Stepwagon CM.

The final speaker for the day was Mr Vince Shortino, President of Crunchyroll Japan branch. He shared on the challenges Crunchyroll faced when trying to obtain licences from the various publishers to stream anime online. I totally agreed with his viewpoint that by being able to deliver subtitled anime to fans in a timely fashion, it would reduce illegal distibution of fansubs. Fansubbers would no longer see the need to fansub an anime that is already subtitled and available legally.

The final panel session saw those on stage continuing the discussion on how to engage the anime fans while protecting the intellectual property rights of the production companies.

Overall, I was happy to have attended the Animation Asia Conference 2009, and the sessions were well-paced. I would have prefer if they actually let the audiences ask some questions during the panel discussions, especially since there is a moderator on stage. The only glitch for the event was that the translation was done poorly and thus I ended up missing some segments of what the Japanese speakers had to say. I do hope the organisers will continue the conference and bring in more great speakers for next year ^^