‘No Dogs Or Italians Allowed,’ ‘Titina’ Top Tokyo Anime Award Festival

Tokyo Anime Award Festival wrapped up this week at a ceremony during which a pair of features and four shorts were honored with prizes.

The feature film competition saw No Dogs or Italians Allowed and Titina both score awards. Alain Ughetto’s stop-motion immigration tale No Dogs or Italians Allowed took the grand prize with Kajsa Næss’s 2d family feature Titina scoring the excellence award. The other two features which screened in competition were Nuno Beato’s My Grandfather’s Demons and Signe Baumane’s My Love Affair with Marriage.

In the short film section, The Borderline won the grand prize with The Queen of the Foxes taking the award of excellence, Swing to the Moon the Toshima City Award, and 3 Intestine Road, Fish Island the student film prize.

This year’s feature competition received 31 submissions from 26 countries and territories while the short competition got 872 submissions from 63 countries and territories. Four features and 29 shorts were then selected to screen at the festival.

Tokyo Anime’s feature animation jury was filled out by producer Fukashi Azuma (Gin Tama, Naruto: Shippuden), director Ryuichi Kimura (Gurren Lagann, Beyblade), director Cesar Cabral (Bob Spit – We Do Not Like People, Storm), and journalist Haery Kim.

Short animation jury members included director Kenji Kodama (Cat’s Eye, Detective Conan), producer Tetsuro Satomi (Galaxy Angel, Samurai Champloo), director Charlie Belin (Le Coin, Funny Birds), and the National Film Board of Canada’s head of festivals and audience development Elise Labbé.

2023 Tokyo Anime Award Festival Winners

Feature Animation

Grand Prize

No Dogs or Italians Allowed – Alain Ughetto (France, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, Portugal)

Award of Excellence

Titina –  Kajsa Næss (Belgium, Norway)

Short Animation

Grand Prize

The Borderline – Christian Arredondo Narváez (Mexico)

Award of Excellence

The Queen of the Foxes – Marina Rosset (Switzerland)

Toshima City Award

Swing to the Moon – Marie Bordessoule, Adriana Bouissie, Nadine De Boer, Elisa Drique, Chloé Lauzu, Vincent Levrero, Solenne Moreau (France)

Student Film

3 Intestine Road, Fish Island – Moe Wakabayashi (Japan)