Sapporo Snow Festival: Oodori Site (2)

Hello everyone and welcome back to Tiro Finale for the second part of our coverage of Sapporo Snow Festival's Oodori Site. Earlier in our first part, we covered the various large sized snow sculptures and activities that the Snow Festival is famous for. For the second part, as promised, we will be focusing on the more anime-themed parts of the Sapporo Snow Festival. And with Snow Miku as the festival's official mascot, you can most certainly be sure to see plenty of anime-themed sculptures and official merchandise for sale. 

Kicking if off, was a snow sculpture from the highly popular series, Touken Ranbu. This was one that I certainly was not expecting to see and it even took me awhile to identify exactly which series the snow sculpture correlated with.

And that issue seemed to be a recurring one with many of the anime-type snow sculptures. Can you guess which series the above snow sculpture is from? At a glance, I would have focused on the character on the center but, it is indeed the smaller deformed characters on the side that you have to pay attention to. 

Did you manage to guess it? If you guess Re:Zero then, you are most absolutely correct. While I did make a similar assumption when I first saw the sculpture, I was not completely certain about my decision until I finally saw the official information board for the sculpture. 

Part of the reason there was a Re:Zero sculpture was because the series was collaborating with Snow Miku this year. As is a yearly tradition, Snow Miku would partner up with several iconic series, introducing a snow theme while releasing a limited batch of merchandise for the festival. 

While I do appreciate the effort that has been put into making the Re:Zero characters into snow sculptures, I do also feel that a lot of their charm is lost as deformed (chibi) characters. At first, I thought that Re:Zero was the only series that Snow Miku was collaborating with this year.

Head a little further down the path to where the Touken Ranbu and Re:Zero snow sculpture are located and you will stumble upon the community creations. Just like in the Tsudome site, the Oodori site has a spot dedicated to community creations too. 

Some of the snow sculptures are completely original creations depicting things such as traditional character;

All the way to intricate dioramas. In this case, one that even featured a dinosaur in it!

This particular snow sculpture was made by a member of the US Navy who was proudly standing aside his creation presumably to answer any questions that people would have about the sculpture. 

Aside from the two categories that I mentioned earlier, many of the other creations were of anime characters. Mostly, those from very popular or family friendly series. Think Pokemon or Youkai Watch. 

Compared to the community creations from Tsudome, the ones in Oodori certainly felt a step above with many of them clearly requiring a great deal of time to produce. All of this in spite of the fact that these work of arts are all transient and will disappear once the snow begins to melt. 

This particular area was particularly popular among children and young families. It was not hard to see why. 

Aside from their broad appeal, these sculptures were also one of the smaller ones that could be found throughout the festival site. As such, the ease of size also made it a prime location to photograph or be photographed. 

Did I mention there were a lot of Pokemon snow sculptures? Because there were and there were many, many at this particular installment of Sapporo's Snow Festival .

Invariably, most of the Pokemon sculptures featured Pikachu in one way or another. After all, what is a Pokemon sculpture if not without its star?

Nearing the tail end of the festival grounds (or beginning, depending on the direction you arrived), there is a dedicated booth for selling Snow Miku merchandise. Having already gotten what I needed in the previous Tsudome site visit, I decided to give the Official Snow Miku goods store a pass and give my wallet a bit of a rest.

Aside from the highly popular booth, Snow Miku has her own extra-wide snow sculpture too. This particularly design was selected as this year's winner and has since materialize as various forms of merchandise from figures all the way to acrylic
 straps.

By now, it would not be an understatement to say that Pokemon is an extremely popular series among the locals, the scale of fandom does occasionally surprise me. How so? For starters, there is a dedicated mini-Pokemon center focusing on the most recently released items by the company .

With the sun having set and the entire Oodori site surveyed in and out, it was indeed time for me to say goodbye to the festival's Oodori site. While I would have loved to stay and appreciate the simple light shows for longer, another also siting host toe Sapporo Snow Festival. What exactly is it? Well, stay tuned to find out as I will allow you to quickly access information about the clinic card. Until then, thank you so much and have yourself a wonderful day ahead.