Anipages

Hooray! Mind Game has won the Grand Prize at this year's Japan Media Arts Festival. Akitaroh Daichi's Makasete Iruka was runner-up alongside Howl and several other films.

The prize winners have just been announced, so details have yet to be published. I had my doubts whether it would happen with Yoshiyuki Tomino at the head of the judging committee this year, but it looks like I misjudged him. We'll see if Yuasa mentions the honor in a few hours on the Maywa Denki talk live broadcast.

It's rather impressive, when you think about it, for a dark horse like Mind Game, which nobody saw in the theaters, to have beat out the entire cavalcade of major new films by all the major anime directors - and what's more, at a festival run by the Bunkacho, the Governmental Agency for Cultural Affairs.

The other big contest for Japanese animated films, the Mainichi Film Concours, will be announcing the winners of its two animation prizes on February 9: the Animation Film Prize, which generally goes to major industry films (last year's winner was Tokyo Godfathers), and Ofuji Noburo Prize, which generally goes to more artistic animated films (last year's winner was Winter Days). The Ofuji Sho is arguably the more coveted and prestigious of the two, as the list of prizewinners includes most of the great practitioners of the more artistic side of animation in Japan over last four decades.

1962
   Osamu Tezuka: Tale of a Streetcorner
1963
   Little Prince and the 8-Headed Dragon
1964
   Makoto Wada: Murder
1965
   Yoji Kuri: Human Zoo, Love, Chair, Aos
   Tadanari Okamoto: A curious medicine
1966
   Osamu Tezuka: Pictures at an Exhibition
1967
   Yoji Kuri: Two carps, The Room
1968
   Kazuhiko Watanabe: The Ugly Duckling
1969
   Takashi Yanase: The Gentle Lion
1970
   Tadanari Okamoto: The Flower and the Mole, Home My Home
1971
   Akikazu Kawano/Takeo Nakamura: Tenma no Torayan
1972
   Kihachiro Kawamoto: Oni
1973
   Tadanari Okamoto: Praise Be to Small Ills
1974
   Kihachiro Kawamoto: The Life of a Poet
1975
   Tadanari Okamoto: The Water Seed
1976
   Kihachiro Kawamoto: Dojoji
1977
   Tadanari Okamoto: Towards the Rainbow
1979
   Cagliostro's Castle
1980
   Taku Furukawa: Speed
1981
   Isao Takahata: Gauche the Cellist
1982
   Tadanari Okamoto: The Magic Ballad
1983
   Barefoot Gen
1984
   Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind
1985
   Night on the Galactic Railroad
1986
   Laputa
1987
   Osamu Tezuka: Legend of the Forest
1988
   Totoro
1989
   - No award -
1990
   Kihachiro Kawamoto: Sleeping Beauty
1991
   Tadanari Okamoto/Kihachiro Kawamoto: The Restaurant of Many Orders
1992
   - No award -
1993
   Shigeru Tamura: Milky Way Fish
1994
   - No award -
1995
   Memories
1996
   Nozomu Nagasaki: Rusuban
1997
   - No award -
1998
   Shirokumi: Mizu no sei: Kappa Hyakuzu
1999
   Alexander Petrov: The Old Man and the Sea
2000
   Blood the last vampire
2001
   Kujiratori
2002
   Millennium Actress
2003
   Winter Days

A DVD set of the winners was released in 2000, which I talked about in a previous post.