Jordan Renner co-director of this latest documentary talks aobut the 7 years journey to bring this film to the big screen,
We had made these two other documentary projects. One was called, “She Makes Comics,” about the history of women in the comic book industry and while we were making that documentary in around 2014, we heard some really amazing stories from this fellow cosplayer Wendy Pini. Wendy is not only a cosplayer but is also the writer of a really popular independent comic called “Elf Quest.” She began to tell us some of these awesome stories on how she was involved with costuming masquerades at San Diego Comic Con in the 1970s. And suddenly, there’s this whole history of cosplay that we had never heard of, and it sounded like a very different awesome.
We reached out to Yaya in 2015, where she put out a bunch of panels on the history of cosplay. She has been an archivist and documentarian for cosplay for many years doing these panels. This was probably one of our biggest inspirations. We wanted to make this film for others to understand about cosplay and where it came from. We would sit down and talk with her many times and soon she just became the subject in the film because her story was so emblematic of cosplay. She was originally born in Asia and came over to America and had this moment at Anime Expo 1999 and just grabbed the bull by the horn. Her mother didn’t accept the art form of cosplay to be something serious – which is a journey many cosplayers go through. Cosplayers want to be accepted for this art form that they put all of themselves into.
Cosplay Universe is available for free to watch on Tubi and available for purchase on Amazon