If you drive around downtown Sacramento this weekend, you're likely to see people dressed in costumes.
It's the SacAnime convention, which runs Friday through Sunday. The event has taken place every year since 2004, and this year brings a host of vendors and artists, including Jim Cummings, the voice of Disney's Tigger and Winnie the Pooh, and on Saturday Tom Kenny, the voice of Spongebob Squarepants.
Convention spokesperson J. Alexander Arevalos joined CapRadio’s Mike Hagerty to talk about the event and what visitors can expect.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Interview Highlights
So tell us what someone who has never been to SacAnime is going to see if they walk into the convention center this weekend?
Well, first off, you're going to see an amazing selection of attendees dressed up as their favorite characters from popular TV, anime shows, video games, whatever tickles their fancy. It is pretty great to see people just being able to enjoy themselves and express themselves in a safe environment with peers who are in the same boat. They love the same and the same style of media.
How has the convention grown over time?
We are around 28,000 to 30,000 unique attendees per show twice a year, making us somewhere between the fourth or sixth-largest North American convention.
What drives anime's popularity?
It's a medium that allows you to tell stories that are both relatable and interesting and just things you can't record in live action or sometimes just can't be brought to mainstream American TV. So it's just a different style of culture coming in, usually from Asian countries, and it just resonates with people.
It's not just kids and teens and young adults who are attending and taking part in cosplay either, right?
One of the biggest draws for our show is we have a large selection of celebrity guests who are related to popular video games, popular movies, popular comics. One of our biggest names is Jim Cummings, who is the voice of Disney's Tigger and Winnie the Pooh. And we have a lot of Disney voices, a lot of animated voices. We have Don Bluth, who was the director of “An American Tale” and “Fievel Goes West,” and we have his animation crew here also. And that really brings in the adult crowd looking to see, contact and speak to a lot of the people behind the stuff they grew up with.
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