Disney Costume Players: Oh the wonderful wonders of wonderfest

Wonder festival 2011 has come and gone so here is the full event report from Celeste!

Ahhhh nothing like waking up at the crack of dawn to catch 3 trains across Tokyo to attend a one day event of epic purportions! I am talking about Wonder Festival, the once yearly action figure market for handmade sculpture of everything and anything.

Upon arriving to the event at about 9:30 and meeting up with some friends, we purchased our tickets (oddly enough our entry ticket was in the form a super thick magazine of the event that had all the booth listing in it as well as photos of some of the showcased action figures) and then we were guided...well more like corraled around the entire outside of the building to line up and wait out turn to go inside. Admission was 2000 yen and no charge for the cosplay dressing room! I recon there must have been a few thousand people in the line, it was pretty epic. We had to wait about 1 hour to get in but that is pretty standard for Japanese events as half the entire country it seems tries to cram itself into one event building to buy out all the goodies before the competitors do. Surprisingly enough though, once we were inside it was not so busy and there way plenty of room to move around and look at everything. Myself and my friends promptly got in line for the cosplay dressing room.

The line went quickly and we got into our costumes in no time.

The cosplay atmosphere at this event was very relaxed, this is one of the few events that you are allowed to bring big weapons and props so I was able to see many very big cosplays being displayed. Its amazing how much work (and money) some of the cosplayers are willing to put into their costumes. Some costumes could have easily set them back a few thousand dollars! Everyone was pretty cool and there was plenty of room to take photos and do some photoshoots. Myself and a few of my cosplay buddies positioned ourselves against the outside wall of the building letting people come up to use and take photos. Some cosplayers had lines of people waiting to take their photos, others just loafed around and chatted with friends.

Not too many people knew what character I was but that was cool by me, I wanted to come just to look around and socialize anyway so photos werent really on my mind. I went as Lucia from Devil May Cry 2 and as an added bonus was able to walk around with her bad ass swords all day =D

My friend Strifehart went as Squall from FF8 and another of my friends Ayako went as Aya Brea from Parasite Eve 3. Our other buddy Tsumanne, went as a german ww 2 policeman and out of all of us he was the most popular since there are so many reproduction enthusiasts who attend this event. Officer Gixxer was there too in all his Master Chief glory ^^

The day was rather cold out so about 2 hours into it we headed back inside to shop around for a while, so many awesome figures were on display but most of the outside of my budget so sadly enough I could not buy anything =( Wonderfest really needs to go on for 2 days instead of 1 because there is just WAYYYYYY too much to see in one day let alone cosplay at the same time. I think maybe next year I will attend as a vendor to sell some handmade cosplay goods! Fun times!