Niigata International Animation Film Festival (NIAFF), the first film festival in the world dedicated to feature-length animated movies and the largest dedicated animation festival in Asia, concluded six days of colorful and lively events on Thursday, March 20. Winners of NIAFF’s Feature Film Competition awards were revealed at the 2025 edition’s closing:
Grand Prix – Look Back, directed by Kiyotaka Oshiyama
Kabuku Award – Memoir of a Snail, dir. Adam Elliot
Evolve Award – Balentes, dir. by Giovanni Columbu
Honorable Mention – Papercuts: My Life as an Indie Animator, dir. by Eric Power
The winners were awarded with trophies and prizes by the three juries (Manuel Cristóbal, Christine Panushka and Noriko Matsumoto), who evaluated all 12 nominated films.
The Okawa Hiroshi Award and Fukiya Koji Awards ceremony also took place. The recipients were: Shin-ei Animation Co., Ltd., and Kiyotaka Oshiyama (animator), Toshiyuki Inoue (animator), Eriko Kimura (sound director) and Yuki Hayashi (composer).
NIAFF provides a wide variety of programs, including the Feature Film Competition, Retrospective screenings, Animation Camp, talks and forum events. The festival is held in the city of Niigata, the “Animation Capital of Japan”, where many creators of manga and animation originated from, including Hiroshi Okawa, who founded Toei Animation and produced Japan’s first colored feature-length animation movie The Tale of the White Serpent in 1958.
