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| Ōfuji Noburō Award | |
|---|---|
| Awarded for | Excellence in animation |
| Country | Japan |
| First award | 1962 |
TheŌfuji Noburō Award (大藤信郎賞,Ōfuji Noburō shō) is an animation award given at theMainichi Film Awards. It is named after Japanese animatorNoburō Ōfuji.
Following the death of pioneering animator Noburō Ōfuji in 1961, Mainichi established a new award in his honour to recognise animation excellence. A specialist insilhouette animation, Ōfuji was one of the earliest Japanese animators to gain international recognition, winning accolades at the1952 Cannes Film Festival and the1956 Venice Film Festival. This award was first presented in 1962 forTale of a Street Corner (ある街角の物語,Aru Machi Kado no Monogatari) byOsamu 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, theAnimation 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 forKiki's Delivery Service (魔女の宅急便,Majo no Takkyūbin) byHayao Miyazaki.
The award encompasses a wider variety of animation, includingstop motion. Two of the most frequent winners over the years,Tadanari Okamoto (岡本忠成,Okamoto Tadanari) andKihachirō Kawamoto (川本喜八郎), specialize mainly in stop motion. Russian animatorAleksandr Petrov also won for hispaint-on-glass animation film,The Old Man and the Sea.
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