Ōfuji Noburō Award


The Ōfuji Noburō Award is an animation award given at the Mainichi Film Awards. It is named after Japanese animator Noburō Ōfuji.

History

Following the death of pioneering animator Noburō Ōfuji in 1961, Mainichi established a new award in his honour to recognise animation excellence. A specialist in silhouette animation, Ōfuji was one of the earliest Japanese animators to gain international recognition, winning accolades at the 1952 Cannes Film Festival and the 1956 Venice Film Festival. This award was first presented in 1962 for Tale of a Street Corner by Osamu Tezuka.
With the growth of the animation industry in Japan in the 1980s, the award came to be dominated by big budget studio productions, over the work of the independent animators for whose efforts it was originally established. To address this concern, the Animation Grand Award was established to reward large scale cinematic animation, enabling the Ōfuji award to focus on shorter pieces again. Th Animation Grand Award was first presented in 1989 for Kiki's Delivery Service by Hayao Miyazaki.
The award encompasses a wider variety of animation, including stop motion. Two of the most frequent winners over the years, Tadanari Okamoto and Kihachirō Kawamoto, specialize mainly in stop motion. Russian animator Aleksandr Petrov also won for his paint-on-glass animation film, The Old Man and the Sea.

Winners