SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 30 (Xinhua) -- The Crunchyroll Expo 2019, a big gathering for major world players of anime industry and anime fans, opened Friday at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center in Northern California.
The three-day event, which will last through Sept. 1, attracted nearly 100 exhibitors and thousands of anime fans who packed the convention center on the first day to explore what could be the best of anime industry and Japanese pop culture.
The expo will feature panels on anime technology, anime movie premiers, an artist alley festival, concerts and other musical events to entertain the attendees with a celebration of anime titles, manga and games.
Expo organizers invited prominent guests including Toshio Nakatani, a Japanese producer at Nippon Television Network Corporation (Nippon TV), voice actors and actresses of anime movies, such as Kaede Hondo who starred as Sakura Minamoto, the main protagonist of Zombieland Saga (2018), as well as some music composers in the anime industry.
Some anime fans cosplayed their favorite characters, heroes or villains to highlight their special emotions for their virtual idols.
Jazmin Respicio, a senior student of the University of California at Davis who cosplayed Divine Sword Irelia in the League of Legends, said cosplaying is a bit different from playing a character with weapons.
"It's really great to see so many people in cosplayers and come together to love anime and love games. And just to see all these vendors out as well as selling all this work, it's really awesome, really exciting," she said.
Crystal Witten, a designer with an advertising company in California, was cosplaying Shinso Hitoshi in the Japanese anime My Hero Academia.
She said she loved checking out the artist alley at the expo and witnessing the participants' creativity. "It's a cool way to support independent artists," she added.
Witten called herself a long-time anime fan who loves going to conventions to make friends with like-minded people.
She told Xinhua that she was cosplaying a character who was widely regarded as villainous but wants to be a hero.
"I like the idea of a character who rises above the expectations that people put on them and try to be different than what people stereotype him to be," she said.
She also said her company, which already has an office in China, was making advertisements for some Chinese companies, including her own designing products.
She recalled her experience about doing cosplaying and interacting with audience from all parts of the world, including China, on TikTok, a popular Chinese social media platform.
"I like TikTok because it was a fun way to share my cosplay with people that has a relationship with the cosplay community there," she said.
