Individual Eleven – The World's Cyberbrain

Before I get to the sleep deprived anime extravaganza, this all started with the London Girl Geek dinner event that was co-hosted by the event organisers at Sci-Fi London. They were very generous in providing their venue and the talk by Dr Rachel Armstrong was quite intriguing. Afterwards, we went to the bar located downstairs at the Apollo cinema and one of the fellow girl geeks handed me an event booklet. I flicked through to the centre page and there it was, an Anime All Nighter. I turned to Sarah (founder of Girl Geeks) and said I am thinking about going to this, it sounds rather crazy but… she seemed quite keen as was I, so why not.

There were five anime films in total, shown back to back with 15-minute breaks in between. The whole shebang started at midnight on Sunday and it finished at 10am. There were ample supplies of Red Bull and ice cream, which was all included in the price plus a goodie bag. At £30 a ticket, it was well worth the money. The best anime from the five was definitely Ghost In The Shell 2.0, a remake of the original movie with added CGI and in fantastic HD. I simply cannot put into words how amazing it looked; being a GITS fan myself, it really was a visual treat. There was a slight mishap with the PS3 they were using for playback, but they got there in the end. By the way, I can only imagine how good it must be to play a PS3 game on a cinema screen.

Unfortunately, the whole evening was marred by the diabolical Naruto: The Movie 3. To put it bluntly, it was eye cancer and the cheesiness of it all was absolutely unbearable. I could not understand how anyone can like this in any form. The dubbing was dreadful, and Lord Shabadaba? How anyone can dream up of this name and keep a straight face is beyond me. In the end, it was so ridiculous that everyone in the audience laughed at every turn. Sarah’s partner commented that it was the worst anime he had ever seen, and this event was his first taste of anime. I can understand if this movie puts him off anime for life.

The funniest was definitely Panda! Go! Panda! Again bad dubbing, the “daddy” panda sounded like it had an Indian accent with the famous catchphrase for the evening “That’s nice!” The hilarity continued, the accent, the bad dubbing that did not match the subtitles (for some reason there were subtitles even though it was in English), and the hint of panda fondling with the girl in the movie was just too much to bear. I myself could not stop laughing and neither did the audience. The night ended with the catchy “Panda Pa Panda Pa Panda!” song, of course many others and I had to clap along to that one. Overall I had a great time.

I took some pictures of the manga wall, some rather interesting doodles to say the least. I have to apologise for the blurriness, I snapped them on the way out and the Red Bull wings left me.

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