Katie Castelli is quite enthusiastic about celebrating the art of anime.”I couldn’t be without an anime club, and I don’t feel like other people should be without it either,” said Castelli, a freshman mass communication major.Due to Castelli’s passion, Point Park University students now have an outlet to share their love for the Japanese art form.The Point Park Anime Club is a newly established  student interest organization that meets once a week to do activities related to Japanese movie and television animation.Castelli, the vice president of the Anime Club, was not the only one who could not live without an anime club. When she went to her adviser last semester to try to on establish a club, she learned another student was already working on the project.Isabella Jones, who is now the president of the Anime Club, had already been working toward creating a club since last school year. She was a transfer student and was involved with the anime clubs at her previous schools. She planned on joining Point Park’s club, but to her surprise, there was no such club.She began the process of creating the club when Castelli contacted her last fall semester, and the two became a team that would bring Point Park’s anime lovers together.The club offers Japanese animation fans a place where they can come and enjoy watching different anime programs, as well as talk and bond with other students with shared interests.Jones feels that the laidback, yet distinct, atmosphere is one of the club’s biggest strengths.”The great thing about our club is that it’s not major specific or academic related,” Jones said before the club meeting in the University Center last Thursday.Because of its diversity in members, Jones, who is a sophomore cinema major, said the club has something to offer to everyone that has even the slightest interest in anime.Although the Anime Club was just established this semester, the average attendance for a weekly meeting is around 10 to 20 people.Joshua Barr, the secretary of the Anime Club, believes that the number of students attending meetings shows just how many people were unable to connect through their love of anime.”I’ve always been a fan of anime, but many people are ashamed to admit that they enjoy it,” Barr said before the club meeting in the University Center last Thursday.Barr, a sophomore broadcasting major, said the club has brought together many people that he had known previously before the club, but he had no idea they were anime fans.Castelli is ecstatic about the high number of members and amount of dedication being shown in the club, but she also does not want it to become stagnant.”It’s not necessarily the impact we have made but what we will make,” Castelli said.That impact will come in the form of different events for both club members and the rest of the campus. The biggest event being planned for this semester is a trip to Tekkoshocon.Tekkoshocon, which translates to the “Steel Mill Convention,” is an anime convention that is hosted at the Wyndham Grand Hotel in Pittsburgh each year, with an average attendance of 4,000 people. This year, the convention will take place from March 21to March 25.Almost all of the members of the Anime Club will be attending some, if not all, of the days of Tekkoshocon.One of the main activities of the convention is cosplay, which is short for “costume play.” Cosplayers dress as anime characters, and to an extent, act as them. Most of the members that are attending the convention will participate in cosplay, including treasurer of the club, Brittany David.David said she has participated in six anime conventions over the past three years and is an avid Cosplayer.”People treat you like you’re the character, which is really flattering because it means you’ve done a good job on the costume,” David said before the club meeting in the University Center last Thursday.Cosplay is one of the many Japanese cultural traits that the club wants to celebrate and partake in, and they also have found a way to incorporate cosplay into the event that they hope to hold on campus, which is the Maid Cafe event.The officers said they did not just want to have a typical bake sale as their club event, so they chose the Maid Cafe.A Maid Cafe is popular in Japanese culture. In these cafes the servers dress up as maids and act as servants to the customers, and sometimes even treat them as masters as opposed to restaurant patrons.The officers are still working on developing this idea to become an event for the campus, and no specific details have been determined yet.Susan “Jazz” Ricchuito, club member and freshman cinema major, said her hopes for the club are to see it grow and hold more events such as these ones.As a freshman who is just about as new to the university as the club itself, Ricchuito looks forward to seeing where the officers and members will take the brand new club.”I am growing with the club as it is growing,” Ricchuito said. “It will be fun to look back in a couple years and see what the club has become and how it has grown.”The Anime Club holds its meetings in the University Center screening room, 212, on Thursdays from 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. All student are welcome to attend.For more information about the club or its events, contact Isabella Jones at [email protected].