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.
Taiwan is to receive the first batch of Lockheed Martin F-16 Block 70 jets from the US late this month, a defense official said yesterday, after a year-long delay due to a logjam in US arms deliveries. Completing the NT$247.2 billion (US$7.69 billion) arms deal for 66 jets would make Taiwan the third nation in the world to receive factory-fresh advanced fighter jets of the same make and model, following Bahrain and Slovakia, the official said on condition of anonymity. F-16 Block 70/72 are newly manufactured F-16 jets built by Lockheed Martin to the standards of the F-16V upgrade package. Republic of China
Taiwan-Japan Travel Passes are available for use on public transit networks in the two countries, Taoyuan Metro Corp said yesterday, adding that discounts of up to 7 percent are available. Taoyuan Metro, the Taipei MRT and Japan’s Keisei Electric Railway teamed up to develop the pass. Taoyuan Metro operates the Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport MRT Line, while Keisei Electric Railway offers express services between Tokyo’s Narita Airport, and the Keisei Ueno and Nippori stations in the Japanese capital, as well as between Narita and Haneda airports. The basic package comprises one one-way ticket on the Taoyuan MRT Line and one Skyliner ticket on
EVERYONE’S ISSUE: Kim said that during a visit to Taiwan, she asked what would happen if China attacked, and was told that the global economy would shut down Taiwan is critical to the global economy, and its defense is a “here and now” issue, US Representative Young Kim said during a roundtable talk on Taiwan-US relations on Friday. Kim, who serves on the US House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee, held a roundtable talk titled “Global Ties, Local Impact: Why Taiwan Matters for California,” at Santiago Canyon College in Orange County, California. “Despite its small size and long distance from us, Taiwan’s cultural and economic importance is felt across our communities,” Kim said during her opening remarks. Stanford University researcher and lecturer Lanhee Chen (陳仁宜), lawyer Lin Ching-chi
A pro-Russia hacker group has launched a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on the Taiwanese government in retaliation for President William Lai’s (賴清德) comments suggesting that China should have a territorial dispute with Russia, an information security company said today. The hacker group, NoName057, recently launched an HTTPs flood attack called “DDoSia” targeting Taiwanese government and financial units, Radware told the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times). Local tax bureaus in New Taipei City, Keelung, Hsinchu and Taoyuan were mentioned by the hackers. Only the Hsinchu Local Tax Bureau site appeared to be down earlier in the day, but was back
RSS