Shijin no Shougai

The Oofuji Noburou Award (大藤信郎賞) is an animation award given at the Mainichi Film Awards. It is named after Japanese animator Noburou Oofuji.

Following the death of Noburou Oofuji in 1961, Mainichi established a new award in his honor to recognize animation excellence. A specialist in silhouette animation, Oofuji was one of the earliest Japanese animators to gain international recognition.

With the growth of the animation industry in Japan, the award in the 1980s came to be dominated by big budget studio productions, over the work of the independent animators for whose efforts it was originally established. To address this concern, the Animation Grand Award was established to reward large scale cinematic animation, enabling the Oofuji award to focus on shorter pieces again.

(Source: Wikipedia)

Given name: 喜八郎
Family name: 川本
Birthday: Jan 11, 1925
Died: August 23, 2010.

Japanese designer and maker of puppets, a director, writer and animator of independently-made stop motion films and president of the Japan Animation Association since 1989 (until his death in August 2010), succeeding Osamu Tezuka. Previously an illustrator and doll maker, he has collaborated with Tadasu Iizawa and trained under Tadahito Mochinaga and, later, Jiří Trnka. His most famous creations in his native Japan are the puppets he designed and made for a long-running TV series adaptation of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms; internationally he is better known for his own short films. Most of these are model animation; Tabi and Shijin no Shōgai are cutout animation and the French-language Farce anthropo-cynique is mixed media.

(Source: Wikipedia)


Chronological Order

Everything can be found here subtitled, besides Rennyo to Sono Haha
https://archive.org/details/kihachiro-kawamoto

Cutout animation is a form of stop-motion animation usually made with paper or fabric cutouts. The technique was especially popular in Japanese animation before 1934 because cel animation used to be too expensive. Therefore pioneers of anime such as Noburou Oofuji and Yasuji Murata often used cutouts. Silhouette animation is considered a subgenre with its history going back to shadow plays. It is included in a separate stack.

Collage animation is closely related:
https://myanimelist.net/stacks/21389

More Cutout Animation:
Part 2: https://myanimelist.net/stacks/47003
Part 3: https://myanimelist.net/stacks/54180/

Silhouette Animation:
https://myanimelist.net/stacks/47002

These stacks are meant for cataloguing every stop-motion animation on Myanimelist. The list is the result of research by the Stop-Motion Animation Appreciation Society:

https://myanimelist.net/clubs.php?cid=16200

Stop-motion is a form of animation in which objects are manipulated little by little while each frame is shot separately. Puppet animation is the most common, but before 1935 cutout animation was also very common. Among other types are claymation, pixilation (now removed from the database), object and model animation. In this list also works using sand, charcoal or paint are included, since in the form they've been accepted to MAL, they also include gradual manipulation and shot by shot filming.

Part 1: https://myanimelist.net/stacks/47018
Part 2: https://myanimelist.net/stacks/47020
Part 3: https://myanimelist.net/stacks/47021
Part 4: https://myanimelist.net/stacks/47022
Part 5: https://myanimelist.net/stacks/47023
Part 6: https://myanimelist.net/stacks/47026
Part 7: https://myanimelist.net/stacks/47027
Part 8: https://myanimelist.net/stacks/47032
Part 9: https://myanimelist.net/stacks/47034

Part 11: https://myanimelist.net/stacks/47036
Part 12: https://myanimelist.net/stacks/47038
Part 13: https://myanimelist.net/stacks/49186
Part 14: https://myanimelist.net/stacks/51880