Milwaukee’s annual anime convention, Anime Milwaukee, continues to balloon, and its 2013 incarnation, to be held Feb. 15-17 at the Frontier Airlines Center, is expecting some 4,000 attendees, according to its organizers.
The convention is the outgrowth of one very busy student club at UW-Milwaukee, the Japanese Animation Association, which is looking into forming an independent non-profit to run the anime extravaganza.
This year’s event will include an orchestral performance of music from the Final Fantasy series of video games (by the group Distant Worlds), a visit by the music’s composer Nobuo Uematsu (aka the John Williams of video games), a cosplay (costume play) meetup, a rave DJ’d by Color Wars and DJ Tylex, various panel discussions, appearances by anime voice actors, and a Maid Cafe in the Hyatt Regency’s circular, rotating restaurant thing.
There’s a special band of maid-uniform-wearing Maid Cafe devotees who fashion a Japanese Maid Cafe experience at the convention every year, right down to the absence of meal-worthy food. But desserts and parfaits will be provided, as they are at the Maid Cafes in Japan, where otaku (“nerds” who often work in Tokyo’s technology sector) go for a blissful retreat.
