March 3, 2009 03:01 PM | by 
Ningin is proud to announce that we’re working with the prestigious Japan Society in New York City to sponsor “KRAZY! The Delirious World of Anime + Manga + Video Games.” This interactive and progressive gallery exhibit will run from March 13 through June 14, 2009. We’ll have full coverage of the exhibit at http://KRAZY.Ningin.com. To celebrate, we’ll be having an online cosplay contest at the end of March!
The exhibit space is designed to evoke Tokyo’s cityscape by Tokyo-based architectural firm Atelier Bow-Wow. (The exhibit is being built as we speak. Photos will be online soon!) KRAZY! will be made up of several different rooms, each dedicated to a special aspect of anime and manga.
The “Anime Garden” will screen anime films continuously. In addition to the “Anime Garden,” the theater will feature several anime films in digital projection and 5.1 surround sound, including Katsuhiro Otomo’s classic Akira; Masaaki Yuasa’s Mind Game; Satoshi Kon’s Paprika; Patlabor 2: The Movie by Mamoru Oshii; The Place Promised in Our Early Days by Makoto Shinkai; and Super Dimension Fortress Macross: Episode 9 and 27 designed by Ichiro Itano. Theater screenings run from Saturday, March 14 til June 14. Viewing times are Friday, 3 to 9pm; Saturday and Sunday, 11 to 5pm.
The anime sound room will feature soundtracks by Yoko Kanno of Cowboy Bebop and Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex fame.
The “Manga Pod” will be a reading room with close to one thousand magazines. Featured mangas will be Taiyo Matsumoto’s Black & White, Junko Mizuno’s Pure Trance, and Mamoru Nagano’s Five Star Stories. Other manga artists on display are Takashi Okazaki, Yuichi Yokoyama, Hitoshi Odajima, and Hisashi Eguchi.
In the video game design section, the featured Japanese games will include Toru Iwatani’s “Pac-Man” and Shigeru Miyamoto’s famous “Super Mario World,” and “The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker.”
Joe Earle, Director of Japan Society Gallery, has adapted KRAZY! from an exhibition of the same name organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery. Co-curators are the Vancouver Art Gallery’s Senior Curator Bruce Grenville; the world’s foremost authority on manga, Kiyoshi Kusumi, editor of the Japanese magazine Comickers; sociologist, media theorist, and critic Toshiya Ueno; and Will Wright, computer game designer and creator of “The Sims,” “SimCity,” and “Spore.”
On Saturday, March 28, Japan Society will hold its first Cosplay Party and Competition. The Cosplay Competition will have cosplayers competing for gift cards from Kinokuniya Bookstore in New York City. First place will be a gift card of $200, second place will be a gift card of $100, and the third place winner will receive a $50 gift card. Manga Entertainment will also be giving out prizes! The Judging Panel will include Anime and Manga Artists, Professional Cosplayers, and Ningin’s own Lan Nguyen!
All Cosplayer Contestants will be entered into the Ningin KRAZY! Online Cosplay Contest! For two weeks YOU will vote on who the best cosplayer is. Each Ningin user gets one vote so make it count! The winner will get a Manga Entertainment goodie bag filled with DVDs and a Manga t-shirt, a pair of tickets to the New York City premiere of Megaman, and a KRAZY! catalogue - the book that gathers up the entire exhibit.
http://KRAZY.Ningin.com
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