After her visit to Toronto, which of course I couldn’t attend, we were lucky that Natsume Ono made a brief appearance in New York City at Kinokuniya. Even though Kino is often having events, getting a manga-ka is still fairly rare. For those of you less familiar with her, she is the manga-ka behind House of Five Leaves, Ristorante Paradiso, and Not Simple among many others. Natsume was kind and gracious, but camera-shy, and she spent a few moments in every signing to do a sketch.
As I have stated in the past my favorite part of any anime conventions is the ability to meet incredibly talented artists in the fields of anime and manga. The most coveted professionals are manga-ka because their schedules often make it that they cannot be pried away from their desks due to their hellish schedules. So I leap at the chance to speak to any working manga-ka as they usually have made a major sacrifice to appear in the US. When they are at something free like Kinokuniya it is a unmissable treat.
The New York International Children’s Film Festival is a place I like to experiment and quite often go into movies without much knowledge of them. I guess it comes down to the fact that for many of these films, this may be the only chance to see them, especially on the big screen. With a number of films this year being anime, I was feeling even more of an itch to squeeze in as many screenings as I could. Something about that big screen adds a lot to the experience, at least for me. So with that in mind I went to see Mai Mai Miracle where literally the only thing I knew about it was that it was from Japan.
A question I often hear is “Who is going to be the next 
