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Interview: Greg Ayres at Anime Boston 2023
🕑 Added 2023-07-11 00:07:34 +0000 UTCInterviewer: Seth Burn
Editor: Samantha Ferreira
Anime Herald: This will be a “choose your own adventure.”
Greg Ayres: Awesome. I love that.
Anime Herald:
- Cons after the end of the world.
- New Musical Artists you’ve discovered in 2022-2023.
- Moar Winnipeg!
- Your evolution as a voice actor or as a DJ.
- Your one anime you’d recommend for enshrinement in the Library of Congress.
Greg Ayres: Oh wow, those are great “choose your own adventure” jumping-off points. Let’s go with Winnipeg. There’s a weird Winnipeg/Anime Boston connection.
Anime Herald: You’ve been to Ai-Kon many times.
Greg Ayres: There are only five or so cons that I feel like are “home cons” and Ai-Kon is one of them for sure.
Anime Herald: Anything from any of your trips to Ai-Kon that you would like to share?
Greg Ayres: It’s so funny. When you accept a new invite to go to a convention, you never know what you are getting into. That first year I went to Ai-Kon, it was just myself and another actor. I had the most wonderful experience, and he… didn’t. And, it was on him that he didn’t have a good time. He was so busy trying to do this, or get money for this, or go do this sightseeing thing, that he didn’t get to know anybody from Ai-Kon.
Now, there are four or five people in Winnipeg I regularly send birthday gifts to. Several staff members got married last year. I’m always monitoring wedding pictures and stuff. I just never expected, when I got on the plane, what a big space in my heart that city would hold.
t’s so funny. I know so many other people from other parts of Canada, from Nova Scotia to Vancouver. They’re all, “What is it about Winnipeg?” I tell them, “Why don’t you go and find out?”
This last year has been really neat because there were two Ai-Kons that we missed. Being back this last year was wild. It felt like family I hadn’t seen in years. You know that distant cousin you haven’t seen in five years? I think I’ve been a little more clingy to my Canada friends this year because when we saw each other last year, it was the first time we’d seen each other in years.
And for me, a whirlwind, because not only was the pandemic going on, but that was when my father’s health took a dive, my brother’s health took a dive. So many of us lost family members and friends during that time. I’m kind of answering two questions, because I’m doing cons at the end of the world too.
So many of us went through this thing, not alone… because I stayed in touch with everyone. There’s one staff photographer, Tyler, we messaged all the time. So, it’s not like we were alone. We just hadn’t seen each other. So, the next time we saw each other, it felt like it had been forever. So yeah, Jenna, Lisa, and all those guys. I couldn’t get enough of them when I saw them last year. And the city had changed a lot when I went back. I’m excited. There are some things I didn’t get to check out last year. This year I’m going to make sure I have a little bit of time so I can see things.
I’m always so excited to get back to Winnipeg. Even if I don’t get outside of the delta, that one block radius outside of the hotel, it’s like home to me. I have a few restaurants, Tea Story and Kawaii Crepe. I can’t imagine a Summer where I don’t get to see everyone there. It’s such a big part of my life now.
Boston, too. There are a tiny handful of conventions that are like that. Those are the conventions that, any time I think “I don’t want to keep doing this every weekend”, I think, “But then I wouldn’t get to see my friends in Winnipeg. Okay, keep going!”
Musical discoveries during the pandemic? There are so many. I tell people, “Being a DJ is like being a garbage filter.” You have to listen to everything to determine what is workable and what’s not trash. I do that with so much electronic music that it almost feels like work now.
There’s a producer that came up through the anime ranks. He’s from Detroit and he’s a huge anime fan. Huge Gundam Gunpla guy, he’s always building them. His name is E*Tank. He originally started doing remixes of Emo songs. He just recently did Demon Slayer. His Chainsaw Man remix is out of this world. I’m excited to see that guy, especially when it’s someone from our community rising. His name is Adam Besant, but he goes by the name E*Tank. For electronic music, there’s that.
My most recent discovery that I’m obsessed with is a group of French musicians that perform under the name Igorrr. If Monty Python and a French psycho band and a death metal band and Nintendo all had a baby, that’s what you would get. It’s the weirdest assemblage of sounds I’ve ever heard. Probably not anything you would relax to, at the end of the day, but it is so mind-bending to listen to.
There’s an opera singer. They have a French screamo guy. They post a lot of their videos, their “making of” videos on the internet. They show the opera singer singing. The dude playing the accordion is almost riding the accordion. There's a part in the song Houmous that sounds like video game music, there’s a close-up on an NES for like, fifteen seconds.
(Editor’s note: There’s also a cat.)
Being isolated from everybody made my appreciation for music so much broader. I started listening to old music. I started listening to forms of music I had never liked before. I’m an addict for the goth-y rock band Chvrches. That was my first concert out of the pandemic. They did a big outdoor show. I was like, “I can feel okay, being outdoors.”
There’s a guy who is a cosplay photographer. His daughter is in a band called The Linda Lindas. They were on Jimmy Kimmel. Watching them blow up has been neat to see. The tiebacks into our community. I’m sure it will keep going.
Red Bard: You’ve been coming to Boston every year since 2005. What keeps bringing you back?
Greg Ayres: There are some conventions that are different than others. It’s even more evident right now. A lot of anime conventions are rolling towards the way of [San Diego] Comic-Con, which is not a real, personal experience. It’s “Pay money, get an autograph, get in line.” That’s fine if all you want to do is collect things, but to me, anime conventions have always been more about community.
Just like with Winnipeg, my first time for Anime Boston, I had never seen the city. I didn’t know a lot of people here. What bowled me over, and what still holds true to this day, is [it’s this] huge, giant convention, a “gentle giant,” but it still feels like a small event. People are friendly with each other. I don’t see the bickering of fans at each other. I see a really cool community of anime fans.
I’ve always been very fan-centric. Usually, the larger the convention, the worse the fans are treated. At most shows, when I’m being hustled from one place to another, I’ll just have an assistant, or an assistant and a security person. At a lot of the big shows they are like, “Get out of the way, we’ve got to go.” At Anime Boston, every time someone approached me, my handler said, “I’m so sorry, we have to go, he’s going to be late for his event.”
That little thing, “I’m so sorry,” I noticed that immediately. I was like, “Oh my gosh, I can get everywhere on time provided this is how it’s handled.” I don’t mind keeping pace as long as everyone is treated nicely. As soon as someone gets brushed off, I’m going to pull a marker out of my pocket and say, “Hey, did you want an autograph?” because I can’t stand that brush off.
From the jump, Anime Boston was different. It cared as much about its attendees as providing a good industry experience. The cool thing about having a big con that feels small, is that you get the benefits of a big con. I love small cons, they’re my favorite, but you don’t have Puffy AmiYumi at a small con. You get to meet Miyavi at a small con. This is a really rare Brigadoon situation, where you have a big con that’s still a fun to attend, and [has] the perks of both big and small cons.
You can make friends here, see rock bands, go to a vendors’ hall that’s like a mall. It’s different. Those conventions that have a heart are the ones I will always make time for. I will always want to be at the cons that I think treat attendees fairly, treat guests fairly, that treat everyone fairly. It just seems like Anime Boston checks off so many good boxes and does so many things right.
As I moved into staffing conventions, I’ve taken the things I’ve loved from other conventions and tried to implement them at the shows that I work at. “I’m sorry” is a big one. I even asked my handler, “Are you supposed to say I’m sorry?” She said, “We’re told if we’re ever going to deliver a piece of bad news, like that we can’t stop, we’re supposed to say ‘I’m sorry’ first.”
I thought, “That’s brilliant.” So, Boston will always be special to me. I’ve never seen a big show maintain the small atmosphere that Boston has.
Red Bard: What has it been like to watch the con grow over the years?
Greg Ayres: The main thing is that as they’ve grown, they haven’t changed their culture. There’s always going to be staff changes. Autograph culture has changed, so they’ve had to redo how they do autographs. Watching this show get bigger has mostly just been a logistical thing. Anime Boston has always done a great job of managing people’s expectations. So many other shows, as they grow, they change. Anime Boston hasn’t done that.
I remember the first year I was here, Patrick Delahanty, one of the founders of Anime Boston, I said, “This convention center is fantastic.” He said, “Yeah, we’ll never outgrow this place.” There are times that it feels like we’ve outgrown the Hynes. That’s when you realize the show is getting a lot bigger.
Where did we leave off?
Anime Herald: We still have “Your evolution as a DJ/VA” and “Show you worked on for the Libary of Congress.”
Greg Ayres: I worked on a movie called Colorful. It’s very special to me because it was directed by my brother. You have to be careful, because there’s a naughty panty show called Colorful, and this isn’t that. If there’s a butt on the cover, that’s not it.
Without giving away too much, my character commits suicide at the beginning of the show. When he gets to the other side, he’s told he can’t cross over. He has to help another person who hasn’t found their meaning in life. It reminds me a lot of Clannad, in that the acting is very low-key. You don’t have the stereotypical anime voice acting.
So many people in that show are playing against their usual type. Chris Patton normally plays very suave dudes, or quirky high school dudes. He plays kind of a jerk. He plays my older brother, who’s in college and hates his whole family. Carli Mosier usually plays very bubbly people. She plays a wife who gets caught in an indiscretion, and she spends most of the movie crying. Brittney Karbowski normally plays very loud, boisterous characters. She plays this super mouth-breathy, nervous, nerdy girl. She’s one of my favorite things in the movie. Brittney’s performance is brilliant.
It’s a show that tells a very dark story. I love that it deals with a lot of human stuff. Depression, indiscretions, I can’t list off all the things it hits. It feels so dark until the very last twenty minutes. I’ve never seen an impending plane crash pull out of a nosedive so well. It turns into the most beautiful, resolved, positive thing I’ve ever seen.
It’s one of the few things where I still get a little teary-eyed when I watch. It’s hard to talk about the end of it without giving anything anyway. I’ll just say that it goes from, “Can this get any worse?” to a beautiful resolution. If I could install any one title that I’ve worked on in the Library of Congress, that would be it. I’ll probably be proud of Colorful until the day I die. Just a beautiful story.
Red Bard: Any memories from one of the first Anime Boston’s that you’ve been to?
Greg Ayres: This probably has a lot to do with why Anime Boston made such a huge impression on me at the time. I was working on Chrono Crusade at the time. One of the guests of honor was Daisuke Moriyama, the mangaka of Chrono Crusade. A friend of mine had made a Chrono costume. I had worn it at Katsucon the year before. Pat didn’t want to tell me what was going on. He just said, “please bring that costume to Anime Boston.” I said, “Sure.”
As they began announcing guests, I saw that Moriyama was going to be there. Up until then, I hadn’t had good experiences meeting industry people. I had only met a handful from Japan. This was before I had met Nabeshin, or any of the other people I now consider to be dear friends. But, everything I knew about Moriyama told me he was a really good guy, so I was excited I was going to get to meet him.
What I didn’t know is that he’s super shy. Here’s another Winnipeg connection: He had requested that two cosplayers bring him on stage, dressed as characters from Chrono Crusade. So myself, dressed as Chrono, and Riki (now known as Ridd1e), one of the founders of Ai-Kon in Winnipeg, we brought Moriyama on stage, and posed with him. He didn’t know I was the voice actor for Chrono. So after we posed with him on stage, I had lined up again with all the North American guests.
You could see Moriyama and his manager, Kato-san, looking back and forth at me in line and at each other. They were clearly wondering, “Why is he in line?” And every year, Anime Boston does a montage for their guests. My montage was all Chrono Crusade. And then you could see Moriyama and Kato-san look at each other and go, “Oh!” It was just a great moment.
One of the coolest things Anime Boston did for me that first year was allow one of their interpreters and myself and Moriyama to go off, just us. Moriyama said, “If there’s anything you’d like to know about Chrono Crusade, I’d love to talk to you.” I got to have a private audience with the mangaka, for the show that was rapidly becoming one of my favorite things I’d ever worked on. It was unbelievable. That was a nerd/fan moment. I could never imagine meeting a creator, let alone say “hey, pick my brain.”
And the funny thing is, the questions I asked him were nerdy. Very nerdy. And, of course, he’s the creator, he had the answers right at the top of his head. So that’s probably my first memory of Anime Boston.
(Editor’s note: I have spent an inordinate amount of time looking at the photos from the 2005 Anime Boston guest list.)
We also used to have this big informal dance, which is a nice way to say a rave. I ended up running that. Being a part of the staff of Anime Boston, of one those events that sets this apart, was a different feeling. I staff conventions because of that feeling. If you can find videos, we had an incredible time.
When you work towards something, and see a ton of kids having a good time. Everybody has to go back to the real world on Monday. We create this wild and crazy party because of all of the work of the people who staff the show. My second biggest memory was being part of the staff of Anime Boston. It will always mean a lot to me. There’s this weird idea that “you’re a guest, you can’t work.” I love being a part of what makes this run.
A lot of being an actor sometimes… It seems odd to say, but I’m a very shy person. It’s funny, because I get on stage, and I’m silly. I’m not good with a lot of attention directed at me. But being the nuts and bolts behind something, That’s a role I feel comfortable in. I love that.
And then, to this day, it’s kind of like the Winnipeg story. It’s just my family. There’s so many people. I mean, Jill’s my assistant, but I look more forward to being able to have lunch and dinner together, for a weekend. The one bad thing is that all the restaurants change every year, so we have to go through the list and see what’s still here and what’s not. She introduces me to great food.
So much of it is my friends, and people I consider my con family. I could probably fill a book of great stories from Anime Boston. Great people I’ve met, cool things we’ve gotten to do. The guests have been treated so well. We did a cruise around Boston Harbor. Different years they’ve shown us different parts of the city. I think that counts too. So many big shows, the people who run them are local, or live close by.
One of the things that I liked is they look like they love this town. That makes me love this town. It’s the same thing with Winnipeg. If you visit somewhere, you want to see something. Anime Boston has always tried to make me see what they love about Boston.
Red Bard: Anime Boston has a lot of mainstay panels, quite a few that you’ve been a part of. Do you have a favorite?
Anime Unscripted has always been a favorite. It’s funny, because I’m not always comfortable doing improv, because I’m a shy guy. But my brother always used to tell me, and I was telling this to somebody last night, who was nervous about doing improv, “Even when you do bad improv, the audience enjoys it, because they love watching you struggle to come up with an answer.”
I love that event. Patrick [Delahanty] created it. It was originally based off of “Whose Line is it Anyway?” Then, it was more of an Anime Twist. He’s created his own improv structures. That, in and of itself, is really cool. Every year I look forward to the Power Point Roulette. I can’t want to figure out what weird photos he’s going to make us talk over.
I was also really thrilled to be able to do my uncensored panel again this year. I had put that panel on the back burner for a long time, because of a lot of personal stuff in my life, and because it didn’t seem appropriate at that time. But, coming out of this pandemic, I felt that we all needed to laugh. I think people missed it last year when we didn’t do it, so I was excited to see everyone laughing, and having a good time on Friday night, at that.
The one thing I don’t ever get to see is The Masquerade. I always have to see it later. I love looking at the pictures later. That used to be hosted by a very dear friend who passed away. The reins of that job have gone on to Katie, who does Anime Unscripted with us. The signature events at Anime Boston are part of what makes it Anime Boston. It’s funny talking about an event I never have been able to go to. When I get home, I’ll go dig through photos from The Masquerade. The only way I ever got to see our friend MC was watching video clips later.
The one thing I missed this year, I like to go to as many of the musical events as I can. I’ve been able to see Puffy AmiYumi. Miyavi, and Flow. We’ve gotten to see a lot of the concerts. But some years the schedule is a little too hectic. This year, I wasn’t able to. I wanted to go to Helen McCarthy’s panel. But yeah, the music event is one of the big things I always look forwards to at Anime Boston. They never scrimp on the music.
