Gigathread: Good Anime Talks, Presentations, Conventions Panels, Etc.

This was a pain in the ass. Pretty much spent all of my weekend and Monday evening compiling this and watching anime panels. There’s no real easy archive of past years’ line-ups. There are about 64 anime conventions in North America alone. Barely anyone talks about them outside of conventions. Barely anyone even cares about them or goes to a lot of them inside the conventions, even. I’ve been thinking about Harlan Ellison more than usual lately, and he even had a little rant on the importance of recording and archiving speeches at conventions (and also preferred smaller, more personal conventions).

I can’t really see much discussion of them. I don’t feel like asking about them on MAL or r/Anime to get one or two lazy-ass responses. So I had to basically name search conventions, possible panel names, etc. with all of the variant spellings (e.g. 2016, 16, ‘16 or panel, dicussion, speech, presentation, etc.) And even that wasn’t enough. Surprisingly YouTube’s video recommendation algorithm does a better job finding and presenting these things than anything else. I’m not going to go through the trouble of looking through each convention’s website for archived lists of past years’ line-ups, which most of them probably don’t even have.

And some channels would have videos split into 7 different parts and others would have hundreds of anime convention videos to sift through. Some were barely audible. And worst of all, the general quality or interest of these panels is pretty mediocre on average. I saw so many panels on Hetalia, so many Funimation industry panels that are basically hour-long ads, so many voice actors just talking about voice acting (especially Vic Mignogna), so many Q&As with whatever YouTuber. So yeah, here’s what I got. And unfortunately due to the nature of these conventions there’s a high bias towards North America, dubs, and the western half of the industry. There are interviews with invited guests from the industry but you’d have to name-search them directly to really find them, so if you want to find Yoshiyuki Tomino or Mamoru Oshii talks, do that.

I’ll start off with this article, which is a decent overview of the current state of convention panels circa 2015 by MyAnimeList called There Are No More Good Panels at Anime Conventions, which is actually about the opposite. Fittingly, I can’t find any online recordings of any of the panels it mentions.

Next I’ll refer to my past thread here on Mike Toole’s “Dubs That Time Forgot” post for those, which is quite fun. The next ones will be the talks included in playlists and then I’ll have a big playlist on the end that has roughly 40 different talks at the end with a couple recommendations.

I also posted this before, though I deleted it. It’s probably the best rundown on the big-name animators and the concept of sakuga on the internet.
Sakuga: The Animation Of Anime (2013 Presentation)

This is a panel that talks about the history of anime. There are probably better resources for this in articles and other videos on YouTube, but it’s not bad.
AVCon 2011 - History Of Anime Panel

This 1991 panel where the first few North American importers, localizers, dubbers, etc. talk about the pros and cons of subs vs. dubs, the eternal battle.
Anime Con 1991 Sub Vs. Dub Panel

I remember watching a few videos from this guy years ago because he’s one of the few on YouTube who cover retro anime. He’s not always right, I think he can get a little pretentious at times, but he’s not bad. His talk here has some interesting insights on stuff. The first half is his AMA section, the second half is on Miyazaki’s use of mythical animals.
Brent Newhall AMA at Anime USA 2019

In regards to my other post here on Eyecatches in anime (It’s merely a collection of them, not a talk on them), this talk is on anime openings and endings. It’s missing part 2 and he had to cut it short.
Anime Expo 2009: When You’re Not Watching Anime: OPs and ENDs Panel

One of the main guys involved with Robotech gets invited to a big-ass animation convention in China. Not so much informative as it is interesting how that convention operated and the animation scene in China is like circa 2010. Barely comments on anime, but it’s pretty cool and semi-related so I included it.
AnimeExpo 2010: Robotech in China

“The ups and downs of an adapted manga and anime shows on the big screen. On the panel, the executives from both Imagi and Sunrise in this discussion.”
AnimeExpo 2010: Manga & Anime Comes to Hollywood

This one’s cool because AnimeOnDVD was a central player in anime during the 2000s. Their website forum was a pretty big hub and they were one of the biggest distributors of anime for fans in North America. Another west-centric one, but some of the talk of the industry and the physical mediums anime’s preserved and distributed on is important (to a point).
Anime Boston 2011: AnimeOnDVD/Mania with Chris Beveridge

Basically another talk from people who work for western anime localization/distribution companies. Has Crisipin Freeman at least (who I learned from another talk he gave that he smuggled abstract art with his parents outside of Czechoslovakia against communism when he was young, so now I’m against dubs).
Anime Expo 2009 - Get Paid To Work In Anime Panel

Good talk on the history of robots/mecha in Anime. This is another one where there are probably better resources online about it somewhere.
AVCON 2011 - “G” is for Robots: An Explanation Panel

And finally the 39-video playlist of the other ones. I tried to loosely sort it from best to worst, but I gave up since it’s hard to do. I guess some of the really-recommended ones from me would be:

The playlist: Good Anime Talks, Presentations, Conventions Panels, Etc.

As always, feel free to recommend stuff that’s related if you wish.