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Anime Boston is an annual three-day Japanese animation convention held in Boston, Massachusetts. Anime Boston 2008 will be held Friday, March 21st through Sunday, March 23rd at the Hynes Convention Center and Marriot Copley Boston. Anime Boston 2008 will once again be presenting popular events which include a masquerade, an anime music video contest, video programming rooms, an artists' alley and art show, karaoke, game shows, video games, manga library, dances and balls, and much more... We'll also be hosting some special guests and industry representatives at Anime Boston.
Anime Boston 2003 was held at the Boston Park Plaza Hotel on the weekend of April 18th through 20th, 2003. It was the result of eighteen months of planning by The New England Anime Society, Inc., a non-profit organization founded with the purpose of staging Boston's first all-anime convention. The first plans for Anime Boston came along in October 2001. At that time, there was a clear need for some sort of anime event in the Boston area, but nobody had taken the initiative to hold one. There had been a couple small conventions in New England, but anime fans still had to travel to Maryland to find a convention with more than a few hundred people. Adam Ferraro and Patrick Delahanty started working together to gather a team to make it happen in The Hub. A couple weeks later, over the Double Cheeseburger Special at Charlie's Kitchen in Harvard Square, Derek Guder and Tiffani Nadeau joined the team and the first real plans started to come together. Once Adam proceeded toward getting The New England Anime Society incorporated, we all knew for certain that this was going to become a reality and there was no turning back. Other than being anime fans, the other thing that most of the convention's founders had in common was that they were all longtime readers of Anime On DVD. The founders wanted to maintain a good working relationship with the popular anime web site and even turned to its members when it needed to choose a name. Although the board had narrowed it down to two, there was debate over which of those two to choose. The question was presented to members of the Anime On DVD forums and the better choice became clear: Anime Boston. After touring four Boston-area hotels in December 2001, the Boston Park Plaza Hotel won the bid. They not only offered the lowest room rate for attendees, but they were familiar with fan conventions from hosting Arisia for several years. Anime Boston estimated a "worst case scenario" of 600 attendees for its first year. This was nearly double the number of attendees at Mikkakan in June 2001, a record for New England at the time. Even if the high estimate of 1000 people showed up, they would still easily fit in the Boston Park Plaza Hotel. Besides, Arisia has been there for several years with an attendance of around 2,500. Working with Anime On DVD, interest in Anime Boston began growing quickly. Large or nearby anime conventions were peppered with Anime Boston 2003 flyers, program guide ad swaps were arranged, and booth space was reserved at Otakon 2002. By the fall of 2002, Anime Boston was coming along nicely and the pre-registration numbers had surpassed Mikkakan's attendance. Talking with other anime conventions, Anime Boston's senior staff based the new attendance estimates on the advice from other conventions' years of experience. At this point, it was estimated that Anime Boston would have maybe 1,000 to 2,000 attendees by the time the convention came around in April. In the meantime, the convention booked a number of guests. Voice actors Tiffany Grant, Jamie McGonnigal, and Kirby Morrow and game designer Mark C. MacKinnon were among the first to be announced. In late 2002, The New England Anime Society needed to consider booking space for Anime Boston 2004. Figuring that For Anime Boston 2003 would have maybe 2,000 people at most and knowing that the Boston Park Plaza Hotel could hold more than that, a contract was signed to hold Anime Boston at the hotel for a second year. Anime Boston continued booking additional guests and before long had the voice actors for all five pilots from Gundam Wing: Mark Hildreth, Scott McNeil, Brad Swaile, and Ted Cole, in addition to Kirby Morrow. With the assistance of ADV Films, Anime Boston also managed to get a Japanese guest, Hiroki Kanno, the animation character designer from RahXephon. When pre-registration for Anime Boston 2003 finally closed, there were 1,384 pre-registrants...and the staff was in shock. No anime convention had ever had that kind of response in their first year! When the staff arrived at the hotel, they went into shock again to see thousands more invade the Boston Park Plaza Hotel that weekend. Anime Boston 2003's staff regretted having to turn people away, but the Boston Fire Marshal showed up three times and threatened to shut down the convention unless we stopped admitting additional people at around 11:00am on Saturday, April 19th. Had anyone suggested that Anime Boston 2003 would welcome 4,110 people back when the convention was first being planned at Charlie's Kitchen, they would have been laughed right out the door. That just doesn't happen at first-year anime conventions. ...but it happened to Anime Boston. Anime Boston 2004 was held April 9th through 11th at the Boston Park Plaza Hotel & Towers in Boston, Massachusetts. The convention also expanded into "The Castle", a former armory, across the street. Due to overcrowding issues during the previous year, there was a strict attendance cap enforced. As a result, Anime Boston 2004 was sold out in February 2004. The total attendance was 3,656 people. Anime Boston 2005 moved to the Hynes Convention Center. With this move, previous attendance caps were abandoned and 4,125 people (more than had attended either of the previous Anime Boston conventions) pre-registered to attend. By the end of the weekend, nearly 7,000 paid attendees (approximately 7,500 people total) had come to Anime Boston, making it one of the largest Japanese animation conventions in North America. Anime Boston 2006 returned to the Hynes Convention Center and presented the first Kaiju Big Battel performance to ever be held at an anime convention. Due to limited availability at the convention center, Anime Boston moved to Memorial Day weekend and was now scheduled on the same weekend as other anime conventions for the first time, including two of the other ten largest anime conventions in the country. That didn't affect attendance and a record 9,354 people still made their way to Anime Boston that weekend, firmly establishing Anime Boston as the largest anime convention in the northeast. Anime Boston 2007 saw to the addition of two new and highly popular events, the Cherry Blossom Ball and the Swap Meet. Setting another attendance record and breaking the 10k barrier, exactly 11,500 people were at Anime Boston 2007. The convention occupied the entire top two floors of the Hynes Convention Center for the first time and provided space for 57 different vendors in the Dealers' Room and 194 artist spaces in Artists' Alley.
Anime Boston 2004:
Anime Boston 2005:
Anime Boston 2006:
Anime Boston 2007:
* attendance data from other conventions provided by AnimeCons.com
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