A new AX feature this year was the Traditional Japanese Summer Festival, sparked by all the anime “love comedy” series like Hand Maid May, The World of Narue, Mahoromatic and Space Pirate Mito, which include one episode set at an old-fashioned Summer Festival where families wear traditional kimonos and yukatas, play games, eat popular cheap foods like yakitori and okonomiyaki, and watch fireworks in the evening. AX set up a festival in the Marriott's side parking lot.

Some anime fan clubs and a few Japanese-community fast-food restaurants supplied “the Japanese food that you always see in anime” for fans who wanted to know what it tastes like. Those who wanted to could rent cheap kimonos and play carnival games like catching-goldfish and knock-over-the-bottle. It was a good idea, but the Festival was located so far away from the rest of AX that only those who made a determined effort to find it took advantage of it.

In the convention center’s meeting halls, anime companies presented their upcoming releases at industry panels.

This year's dozen featured guests from Japan included Madhouse animation studio founder/president Masao Maruyama; character designers Range Murata, Minoru Murao and Toshiharu Murata; directors Satoshi Nishimura, Shinichiro Kimura and Koichi Chigira; screenplay author Ichiro Okochi; anime theme song vocalists MIQ and Yoko Ishida; and voice actors/actresses Tomokazu Seki and Hiromi Hirata. One of the most impressive moments of the Expo was at the opening ceremonies when MIQ (a belt-it-out singer in the tradition of Sophie Tucker or Ethel Merman) and Yoko Ishida (who specializes in delicate little-girl voices like the theme song for Sugar; A Little Snow Fairy) sang an impromptu duet that blended their voices beautifully.

This year's charity auction raised $49,035 for the City of Hope. The top item was a watercolor or colored marker sketch by character designer Toshihiro Kawamoto of the main characters from Wolf's Rain, which brought $8,000. An ink sketch of the lead character from Gungrave sold for $2,500, and four other sketches brought $2,000 each.

Anime Expo traditionally ends with the presentation of the Society for the Promotion of Japanese Animation's annual Industry Awards. AX's attendees are asked to vote during the first two days on 20 categories of anime and manga releases in Japan and in the U.S. The ballots are tallied during the last two days and the winners are announced at the closing ceremonies. But this year there was a last-minute decision to extend the voting through the third day. This did result in more voting, but the combination of the additional ballots plus one day less to count them all resulted in a presentation of only half the winners at the closing ceremonies, and an apology that the tellers would not have time to tally the other categories until after the Expo.

The winners (available at presstime) were:

Best Manga: USA Release
Love Hina

Best Publication: English-Language
Newtype USA

Best TV Series: USA Release
Inu Yasha

Best Film: USA Release
Sakura Wars: The Movie

Best Film Debut at Anime Expo® 2004
eX-Driver: The Movie

Best OVA: USA Release
Puni Puni Poemy

Best Music Album: USA Release
FLCL

Best Company (USA)
TOKYOPOP

Best Booth Design
ADV Films

So AX 2004 was in general a success, but with an embarrassingly high-profile foul-up at its beginning and end. Better planning next year, guys?

Fred Patten has written on anime for fan and professional magazines since the late 1970s. He wrote the liner notes for Rhino Entertainment's The Best of Anime music CD (1998), and was a contributor to The World Encyclopedia of Cartoons, 2nd Edition, ed. by Maurice Horn (1999) and Animation in Asia and the Pacific, ed. by John A. Lent (2001).