Wooohooo!!
Sorry it's taken me a while to get the round-up from last weekend up everyone! It's been a big week of sorting through the aftermath of the Festival and also making sure I got all the winners names right - there were quite a few comps on!!
I should start off by saying that last Saturday's Animania Festival at the Citigate Central was Hyyooooooge! It was our largest Day Festival yet in Sydney!! Thank you to everyone who came and participated in the events, making our first "mini"-event for the year a really awesome one!!
The day kicked off with a major queue and Festival Staff were all hands on deck to make sure everything went smoothly (sorry about the bottlenecks!!). Venders displayed a wide range of wares from DVDs to insanely cute toys - all at Festival prices! Student clubs were also well represented with SUAnime, Anime@UTS, and longest-running JAUWS, all doing their bit to showcase their wares and raise funds for their club activities.
The Main Stage was bigger and better this year and hosted a range of screenings, wild Animania Olympia activities and of course Cosplay. Ah, Cosplay. Sydney fans gave us the first taste of the kind of costumes we would witness this year and all I have to say is that first taste was Super-SWEEET!
The quality of costumes in our first Animania Festival Cosplay Competition for the year were all well above par. The effort put into costumes as well as the skits made for a fun fun fun time on stage. Winners details below.
[Cosplay Winners]
BEST FEMALE
- WINNER Karen Bloomfield as Queen Brahne from Final fantasy IX
- RUNNER UP Yasemin Arslan as Asuka Kazama from Tekken 5
BEST MALE
- WINNER William Wong as Aosora Keroko from Keroro Gunsou
- RUNNER UP Rob Howard as Cid Highwind from Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children
BEST GROUP
- WINNERS CSC-!AnimA! - Inuyasha group cosplay
- Linlin Bi as Kagome
- Zhongqi He as Kikyo
- Dai Wenxuan as Inuyasha
- Da Zhou as Miroku
- Shu Liu as Naraku
- Tingyu Shi as Kagura
- Qingkun Jiang as Sessoumaru
- Ziwen Liao as sango
- RUNNERS UP Gundam Famiglia - Gundam Seed Destiny group cosplay
- Anneke Jasinski as Lacus Clyne
- Alicia Jasinski as Meer Campbell
BEST SKIT
- WINNERS CSC-!AnimA! - Inuyasha group cosplay
- Linlin Bi as Kagome
- Zhongqi He as Kikyo
- Dai Wenxuan as Inuyasha
- Da Zhou as Miroku
- Shu Liu as Naraku
- Tingyu Shi as Kagura
- Qingkun Jiang as Sessoumaru
- Ziwen Liao as sango
- RUNNERS UP Love Sync - Loveless group cosplay
- Aymie Paull as Youji
- Jelena Butina as Kouya
- Jill Wall as Aoyagi Seimei
- Adrienne Lim as Agatsuma Soubi
- Sheree Rushworth as Natsuo
- Sara Willard as Yamato Nakano
- Darliette Kershaw as Yuiko
- Simone Vonkhorporn as Aoyagi Ritsuka
- Anthea Stouffers as Nisei Akame
And of course then there was the World Cosplay Summit Preliminary Preselection!
For this first Pre-selection, we had three duo entries - all of whom presented high calibre costumes. We had a super Asuka Langly Soryu / 3rd angel combo, and a really cool Eva Unit-01, but the winners of this first Preselection was the D-Gray Man and Black Blood Brothers duos. Congratulations to Gabriella (a.k.a. Cattypatra) Lowgren, Katherine (a.k.a. Tsubaki-chan) Lee, Jasmine Barnes and Liam Patterson - your teams are the first pairs through to the WCS Preliminary Competition to be held at our main weekend-long event in August. More information about these winning teams will can be found here.
And of course no Animania Festival would be complete without our staple features: the Art Area, Karaoke & Screenings, and our Games Room - this year, featuring the Wii on the big screen. Young artists showed lots of flair this year with some really detailed and some really, really, really, omg really, cute drawings entering into our Doodling Competitions. Samples of this artwork will be made available on the Gallery soon, but in the meantime, listed below are our winners.
[Competition Winners]
Games
Tekken
- 2nd Prize Leslie Ho
- 1st Prize John Buckley
Mario Kart: Double Dash!! - Mushroom Cup
- 1st Prize Chris Reyes
Mario Kart: Double Dash!! - Special Cup
Art
Themed
- 2nd Prize Adrijana Pavic
- 1st Prize Misty Sun
General
- 2nd Prize Eriko Parina
- 1st Prize Yeo Myeong Lee
Karaoke
- 3rd Prize Parina Eriko
- 2nd Prize Vanessa Seatang
- 1st Prize Janet Yuen
Last but not least, our new format Yukata Workshop (though running only an hour late) went swimmingly well. Each participant were guided by staff and got time to work on their yukata on their dedicated sewing machine. Both girls and boys, young and old, were taken through the simple and fine details of creating their yukata and it was really great to see the final product at the end of the workshops, as you can see below!
Thank you once again to everyone who attended and we look forward to seeing you interstate or at our MAIN EVENT, the one and only, weekend-long Animania Festival, this year to be held at the Australian Technology Park! Keep your eyes peeled for updates on this one!
Before that though, up next is Melbourne - have you guys got game when it comes to Cosplay? Rev up your lungs Melbourne cos we'll be coming to the Rydges Melbourne in just over a WEEK!!
Stay square,
Amanda