Wolf Children, the newest anime film by Mamoru Hosoda, won the Best Animation award at the 36th Japan Academy Prize, announced last March 8. It also won an award of excellence in the animation category, together with the four other films who were competing for the Best Animation award.
Wolf Children is the story of a woman who falls in love and has two children with a wolf man. It bested out Hideaki Anno’s “Evangelion 3.0: You Can (Not) Redo,” Hiroyuki Okiura’s “A Letter to Momo,” Takashi Yamazaki and Ryuichi Yagi’s “Friends: Naki on the Monster Island,” and Tatsuya Nagamine’s “One Piece Film Z,” for the top prize by getting the most number of votes from association members. The film also previously won the animation film award at the 67th Mainichi Film Awards and the prize for animation of the year at the 12th Tokyo Anime Awards. It also won international acclaim, picking up the best animated feature film award at the 2012 Sitges Film Festival, held in Sitges, Spain.
The animation category at the Japan Academy Prize was established in 2007. This award for Wolf Chidren means Hosoda has won three out of the seven awards since then. He also win in 2007 for “The Girl Who Leapt Through Time” and in 2010 for “Summer Wars”. The other recipients of the award were Taiyō Matsumoto’s “Tekkonkinkreet” (2008), Hayao Miyazaki’s “Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea,” (2009), Hiromasa Yonebayashi’s “The Secret World of Arriety” (2011) and Goro Miyazaki’s “From Up on Poppy Hill” (2012).