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Tokyo Marble Chocolate Wins at Seoul Animation Fest

Production I.G's Tokyo Marble Chocolate OVA has been named the winner of the feature film category at the 12th annual Seoul International Cartoon and Animation Festival (SICAF), which ran from May 21 to May 25. The anime depicts a couple's unusual Christmas night out and their attempts to find each other after getting separated. Tokyo Marble Chocolate competed in the feature film category against America's Delgo, Russia's Prince Vladimir, France's Princess of the Sun, and Spain's RH+: The Vampire of Seville.

As the directorial debut of Naoyoshi Shiotani and Production I.G's latest full-length project, Tokyo Marble Chocolate commemorated the 20th anniversary of both the animation studio and the music company BMG Japan. The film was inspired by two songs from BMG artists SEAMO and Sukima Switch. Production I.G described the plot as “a pure love story, colorful and sweet, yet a bit bitter, just like a piece of chocolate.”

Tokyo Marble Chocolate was the only Japanese entry in any of SICAF's competitive categories, but several more anime feature films and shorts screened in the festival's non-juried lineups. Shuhei Morita's Freedom and Masahiro Ando's Sword of the Stranger (recently licensed in the United States by Bandai Entertainment) were both screened during the festival's Inspiration of Asia program, which focuses on directors who are less well-known, but show great potential. They were joined by Koji Yamamura's Franz Kafka's A Country Doctor and various Japanese CG and experimental animation shorts such as Mirai Mizue's Lost Utopia, a 5-minute hand-drawn animated take on the Biblical story of Adam and Eve that uses 5,000 frames; Magnetic UFO, a new short created by Studio 4°C and directed by Shōjirō Nishimi; and Boneheads, a co-production between Japanese director Hiroshi Chida and California-based animation company Frederator Studios (Nickelodeon's The Fairly OddParents).

Image © 2007 Production I.G/Tokyo Marble Chocolate Production Committee