Taichung Deputy Mayor Chang Kuang-yao (張光瑤) yesterday led a delegation to Japan to seek advice on how to develop the Taichung International Animation Festival.
The delegation visited the Association of Japanese Animation and was received by the director of the association’s annual Tokyo Anime Award Festival, Takeuchi Koji.
Taichung’s festival — now in its fourth year — is the only city-hosted film festival for animation in Taiwan, Chang said.
Photo courtesy of the Taichung City Government
The Taiwanese film On Happiness Road (幸福路上), produced with help from the Taichung Information Bureau, won the grand prize in the feature film category at the Tokyo festival, Chang said.
Chang said he hopes their visit will foster more opportunities for collaboration to develop the festival and the local animation industry.
While the animation industry in Japan is flourishing, the majority of production companies are small to medium-sized businesses, which is why the association is consolidating resources to host the Tokyo festival, Koji said.
By promoting excellent animation from the domestic market and abroad, the association is providing a platform on which young people interested in pursuing careers in animation can display their creativity, Koji said.
The Tokyo festival critiques every entry based on its creativity, novelty, ability to achieve resonance with a general audience and use of technology, Koji said.
“We make our decision based also on what the Japanese animation industry was, how it is now and where we envision it will go,” Koji said.
Judges include people not only from Japan, but also other parts of Asia, Europe and the Americas, Koji said.
Winning a top award at the festival not only helps raise a filmmaker’s profile, but also allows their piece to be shown publicly in Japan, Koji said, citing unspecified statistics.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching