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Ottawa Animation Fest to Screen Colorful in September
posted on by Andrew Osmond
Canada's Ottawa International Animation Festival announced its selections for this year's September 21-25 event on Wednesday. The films include Keiichi Hara's award-winning feature film Colorful and new works by Koji Yamamura and Domo creator Tsuneo Gōda.
Based on the movel by Eto Mori, Colorful is about a person trapped outside the endless circle of life and death. Thanks to winning a lottery in the angel world, the protagonist is brought back to inhabit the body of a 14-year-old boy — who just committed suicide. Thus, the protagonist begins a new life.
The film won the Best Animation Film Award at 65th Mainichi Film Awards. This June, it won the Mention spéciale (Special Distinction) and the Prix du public (Audience Award) in the Feature Film category at France's Annecy, the world's largest animation film festival.
Also playing at Ottawa is Koji Yamamura's new film, Muybridge's Strings, which was made in collaboration with the National Film Board of Canada. Yamamura is best-known for his previous short films such as Mt. Head (an Oscar nominee), The Old Crocodile and Franz Kafka's A Country Doctor. The latter film won the 2007 Ottawa Grand Prix.
Tsuneo Gōda, best known for his stop-motion shorts featuring the brown furry NHK mascot Domo, created a new Nissan commercial, “Plug: The New World.” Its title character has a plug for a head and represents a zero-emission world.
The other titles in the festival selection are:
| Geidai Animation | Toshiko Hata, ALIMO (none), Aya Tsugehata, Wataru Uekusa & Ryo Orikasa | Tokyo University of the Arts |
| Many Go Round | Yoshihisa Nakanishi | |
| Kuroi longskirt no onna (Black Longskirt) | Hoji Tsuchiya | |
| Haru no shikumi (The Mechanism of Spring) | Atsushi Wada | |
| Idea ga tsukamaranai(Uncapturable Ideas) | Masaki Okuda | Tokyo University of the Arts |
| Joyz “Electropia” (Music Video) | Noriko Okaku | |
| Ho-Ho “This Message is Boiling Hot” (Music Video) | Masanori Okamoto | Sony Digital Entertainment Service inc. |
| AND AND | Mirai Mizue | |
| STEPS | TOCHKA | |
| Scripta volant (Writings Fly Away) | Ryo Orikasa | Tokyo University of the Arts |
Source: Anime Anime Japan
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