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8th Kyoto Animation Awards Grants Honorable Mention in Full-Length Novel Category

The official website of the anime studio Kyoto Animation (The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Sound! Euphonium, A Silent Voice) announced the results of the eighth Kyoto Animation Award program on Saturday.

The studio awarded an honorable mention in the full-length novel category for Hiroshi Yūki's Nijūseiki Denki Mokuroku (20th Century Electricity Catalog). The studio awarded no grand prizes, and no Animation DO Special Award prizes in the full-length novel category, and no grand prizes, Animation DO Special Award prizes, and honorable mentions in the short novel category.

This is the first time in three years that a novel was awarded an honorable mention.

The category for the awards this year differed from previous years. In previous years, Kyoto Animation divided the categories into manga, scenario, and novel categories. The studio awarded no grand prizes, no Animation DO Special Award prizes, and no honorable mentions in the in all three categories both last year and in 2015.

In the fifth annual awards in 2014, the Violet Evergarden novel won the grand prize in the novel category, and the Santa Claus no Tomodachi (Santa Claus' Friend) and Kinō no Koi wa Kyō no Yume (Yesterday's Love is Today's Dream) novels received an honorable mention. No grand prizes or honorable mentions were awarded in the scenario or manga categories. 2014 marked the first year that any work won a grand prize in any of the three categories. Kyoto Animation is currently producing an anime adaptation of Violet Evergarden.

For the fourth awards in 2013, three novels were honored in the honorable mention category, but no other awards were given out. No winners were awarded in the third awards in 2012.

Previous honorable mention recipients in the contest's history have been animated despite not winning the grand prize. The honorable mention works that have been animated include Chū-2 Byō Demo Koi ga Shitai!, Free! (originally known as High Speed!), and Kyōkai no Kanata. Kyoto Animation's imprint also published O-Yashiki to Coppelia by 1st Kyoto Animation Award honorable mention recipient Mutsuki Ichinose, and later his novelization of Kyoto Animation's Tamako Market anime.

Kyoto Animation announced the award program in 2009 and offered 300,000-yen (about US$3,600 at the time) grand prizes and 100,000-yen honorable mention prizes in novel, manga, and scenario (script treatment) categories. The awards added the "Animation DO Special Award" in 2015. In the first year, the rules noted that popular winning entries were to have had a chance at being animated by Kyoto Animation, but the rules for the second year did not mention this possibility.

[Via Yaraon!]