Like the Eisners at Comic-Con International, so are the Tokyo Anime Awards at
Tokyo Anime Fair, except that TAF's awards are much younger (Eisners: 22 years, TAAs: 9 years). Unfortunately for you guys, none of
this year's winners are generally available in North America...yet. I can pretty much guarantee all of them will be!
Summer Wars: Best Director, Best Original Story, Best Screenplay, Best Art Direction, Best Character Design, Best Feature Film, and Animation of the Year.
,
Best Original Story,
Best Screenplay,
Best Art Direction,
Best Character Design, and the biggie,
Animation of the Year, all went to one title:
Mamoru Hosoda's
Summer Wars. I don't know how he managed to not only meet but beat expectations after his phenomenal work on
The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, but I can't wait to see it.
Fun fact: The Girl Who Leapt Through Time also won all of the aforementioned categories in 2007. But there's one award that Summer Wars nabbed that Girl did not:
Best Feature Film. (Girl was beaten out by
Paprika and
Arashi ni Yoru ni in this category.) Having thus surpassed its predecessor, all I can say is: congrats, Hosoda-sensei, now bring the freakin' movie to San Francisco already.
Eden of the East
K-On!
Moving along, this year's
Best TV Anime were
Production I.G's
Eden of the East and
Kyoto Animation's
K-On!, the
Best OVA was
Eve no Jikan/Time of Eve, and the
Best Foreign Animation went to Wall-E. (Yay!)
Hiroshi Kamiya won
Best Voice Actor for his work in
Bakemonogatari as our hero,
Araragi-kun-- you can hear him now as info broker
Izaya in
Durarara!! over on Crunchyroll. And finally,
Evangelion 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance took home the
Best Music award.
Also of note:
Fumiko no Kokuhaku, the hilarious YouTube short which you may remember, was among the
Award of Excellence for a Student winners. Awesome!
What do you think? Did you see any series in the last year that you thought should be here, too?
*Grabs Tinfoil hat from HeeroYuy and puts it on* Ya!
Seriously though, it was probably just a year without much competition so something that was well done gets to look like it was the best thing ever because of the lack of competition. Then again some times they really are just that good. Or it may have been the show to give the convention the biggest money hat, who knows.