A new Japanese anime award planned for 2027 should put the people who make anime in the spotlight, industry leaders said at TIFFCOM, the market of the Tokyo International Film Festival.
The session was moderated by Fujitsu Ryota, programming advisor for the festival’s animation section. Shimizu Akira, a director of the Association of Japanese Animations (AJA), is president and representative director of A-1 Pictures. He was joined by Studio Chizu president Saito Yuichiro, producer of “The Girl Who Leapt Through Time,” “Summer Wars” and “Wolf Children,” and Saito Masaya, chief manager of Toho’s animation division and planning group leader.
The award’s name and outline will be revealed Nov. 2 at the closing event of Tokyo Anime Next, the festival that organized the session. Co-hosted by the AJA and the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, Tokyo Anime Next runs Oct. 30–Nov. 2 in Tokyo’s Ikebukuro district, with several events at TIFFCOM.
The 2027 launch date has yet to be confirmed, and the panelists stressed that their views were not the award’s official positions.
“Creators should be highlighted – and they should be put in the limelight,” Shimizu said when asked about the timing of the launch.
Saito Masaya said Toho had helped work on the concept for the award, and agreed that creators should be highlighted. He added that the award could give fans a more direct connection to the people behind anime’s global popularity. The company wants to “help achieve a wider reach to anime fans and help give them a wider perspective,” he said, bringing them closer to different creative styles and approaches.
Saito Yuichiro, a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, said an award is only one part of what the Academy does. “There are many different branches of work beyond the award,” he said. “The Academy Award in the United States is a domestic award, but it now has a global membership. They also provide training, and try to create a sort of succession plan for the industry. This kind of philosophy is the backbone for the award.”
Ideally, the panelists said, financial support and training would also be among the building blocks of the new award.
Saito Masaya said he hoped the award “can contribute to the changing of the ways audience enjoy anime.” He wants fans “to notice a certain aspect and ask who is behind this,” he added.
Shimizu said the need to showcase the value of Japanese animation was “one of the key phrases.” “Japanese anime has a very unique workflow and processes, so who does what and who evaluates what, and who delivers those, and how are they embraced and valued by the audience,” he said.
The panel noted that some awards have already picked up on that uniqueness. The Annie Awards have added a best international anime production for TV/media category for their 54th edition.
“Japanese anime is a standalone established category,” Shimizu said, “anime is different from Disney, it is different from Pixar.”
He said the new award should reflect those differences by spotlighting the creators who work on each part of an anime’s production. “For a layperson, the beauty of the anime can’t be expressed clearly in words,” he said.
Saito Yuichiro said the world has two major trends. “The first one is this European Art History, generated from that long history and value system, and the worldwide large-scale trends centered in the United States. The world is composed of these two systems,” he said.
He asked whether Asia could build its own equivalent “aesthetics and value system,” and whether an awards body could help bring an Asian voice into a system he sees as dominated by Europe and the U.S.
“Borderlessness is very important, what I’d hope is to blur the boundaries between these areas of the world with these awards,” he said.
