SacAnime draws thousands of people to temporary home at Cal Expo for weekend of celebration

It’s that time of the year again. Time to get your nerd on.

SacAnime is back this weekend, this time at Cal Expo. The biannual convention that celebrates and promotes anime and pop culture with dates in both summer and winter, is taking a break from its usual haunts at the Sacramento Convention Center, which is undergoing renovations.

This is the first year since 2013 that the convention has been held somewhere other than the Convention Center, but plans are to move back to the Convention Center for 2021 when construction is complete.

Several stars from the anime, video game and television world were scheduled to attend including Steve Blum, Jack DeSena and Max Mittelman among others. Conventiongoers are encouraged to dress up and cosplay their favorite characters and people, and past years has drawn several thousands dressed up as everything from costume play creatures to action heroes.

For attendee Jacob Standley, this was his ninth convention since going to the winter 2016 show, and he plans to keep going so long as there is one.

“I come here because there’s a lot of like-minded individuals such as myself who don’t really care about how society feels about them,” Standley said. “For the longest time, anime culture and nerd culture were really looked down upon. But within the past couple of years and such a rise of things like Marvel movies, TV shows, DC movies, its become the norm. It’s become sort of a popular thing now.”

Standley was dressed as Tinky Winky and playing popular dance songs Saturday from a boombox to a group of people gathered around dancing. It was something that he said was fun thing to do.

“It’s always a good time, especially when you find people or when you’re like me and you set up a speaker with music and get a lot of people that come in from all ages and gender and just have a good time.”

And even newcomers have an easy time finding something to like about the convention. Claire Smith and her sister Shannon Laurens received tickets to the convention as a Christmas gift.

“A friend of ours had gone and said, ‘Oh, you should go, it should be a present for Shannon’. And so I did,” Smith said. “I just like looking at all the cosplays that people do. A lot of them are really cool. I’ve been taking a bunch of pictures today.”

Laurens, who is a fan of non-fantasy anime, said that she was excited to go and looking forward to seeing all that was on display.

“I just really like anime and I was really excited when I got it from my present,” Laurens said. “I think my favorite part is the cosplays and I was really looking forward to getting signatures.”

The convention did throw some people for a loop as the Sacramento Police Department received calls about a man with a ski mask, bulletproof vest and carrying a gun. But it turned out that he was just headed to the convention and he was not arrested, a spokesman for the department said Saturday.

There’s still plenty more to do with a rave on Saturday night and several more panels and signing events scheduled for Sunday. For more information, go to sacanime.com.

For those people who may not be all that into anime, Cal Expo is also hosting the Great Train Expo running concurrently next door. Details on that show are available at calexpo.com.

This story was originally published January 4, 2020 at 7:36 PM.