IMAF Announce Winners

Date: 2005 April 19 13:51

Posted by Joe

The International Manga and Anime Festival have just announced the winners of their first international competition. The London based event started last year as a trial run and has proved very successful indeed. The entrants work was displayed in London County Hall in December. This was a very high profile event, located near the famous London Eye, with a $75,000 prize fund which even ran adverts in national newspapers. We covered the story originally here.

The Otaku News Crew would like to congratulate all the winners in this competition, especially talented artist Wing Yun Man, who is well known in UK anime fandom as part of the Sweatdrop Team, she is also a member of the Otaku News Crew and finds time post the occasional story and draw lovely artwork for us!

Full Story

Press release as follows:

MANGA AND ANIME TALENT REWARDED BY IMAF

The winners of the first-ever annual international competition to identify the best in Manga and Anime talent in the world have been announced, with $75,000 worth of prizes being awarded by organisers IMAF – the International Manga and Anime Festival.

The top prize goes to Kosal Sok, who won ‘Outstanding Entry’ for the brilliant animated film ‘Weather Toy’. Living in Villepinte, France, Kosal is a final year student of animation art at Gobelins. The prize for ‘Outstanding Entry’ is $30,000.

Kosal describes Weather Toy as a short story about two children who play with a special remote which controls the weather.

There were also nine category winners, each receiving $5,000 dollars each. These are:

Comic Strip

The Kids Comic Strip prize has been awarded to Wing Yun Man for ‘Sparkling Gift’ – her cute story about 11-year old Pikapikahikaru who needs to get a present for her best friend Chain, but she doesn’t know what. Wing Yun Man is a freelance artist and designer, living in London.

The prize for the best Teens Comic Strip has gone to Sara Mayhew for ‘Secrets of Sorcerers’, the story of a young girl named Kaori Miki who enters the body of a dead mage in another dimension. Sara lives in North Bay, Ontario, Canada, and is a recent graduate of graphic design from Canadore College.

The Adult Comic Strip winner is Manuel Carot Gonzales of Barcelona for Ari. He is a professional comic artist and illustrator, and has previously won the Cornella and Calogne Comic Contests, and a Best Script Award in the Barcelona Comic Festival.

Character Design

Asia Alfasi, currently a second-year time-based-media student in Birmingham, is the winner of the Kids Character Design. She has drawn on her Arab heritage to create Monir, an Arabian muslim child (and a prince although he doesn’t know it) who has learned to fight to stay alive and look after his twin sister Monira.

The Teens Character Design prize has been awarded to Ben Krefta for the creation of Sosuke, a thoroughly ‘cool’ Japanese/Korean guy, an artist in his own right, who spends many hours working on his artwork and original comic book stories, and produced caricatures in the mall rather than doing his homework. Ben is a kitchen designer and freelance artworker from a tiny Kent village, St Mary Hoo.

The Adults Character Design winner is David Millgate, a Sheffield-based freelance artist/illustrator for E.V.E (Eugenix-Vertex-Ectomorphic-model) a cutting-edge assassination robot, designed a built by robot conglomerate Eugenix-Inc, who are based on the satellite moon of I-O.

Short Film

Professional animator Ben Mars (credentials include Cubies and other children’s animated series) won the Kids Short Film prize for Little Dog Turpie ‘a fairy tale told the way fairy tales should be’. Ben, who lives on a narrow boat currently moored in Cardiff says of his film that it is ‘morally and conceptually strong, meeting children’s base fears and emotions.’

Madevi Dailly is the winner of the Teens Short Film prize with The Day the Buffalo Escaped, a story of lost childhood under the Khmer Rouge regime. Describing a moment of trauma and pain, it takes inspiration from the rich visual and mythological traditions in Cambodia. Medevi graduated from Edinburgh College of Art last year, and is setting up a new business to manage online and onscreen productions.

The Adult Short Film winner is Sabine Ravn for Bernie & Bingo. Sabine, who graduated from the Denmark Film School in 2004, and now works as an animation director, won the category for ‘Bernie & Bingo’. The film is based on Sabine’s own experiences and in the film she appears as the penguin Bingo.

According to Dr Andre Singer, of the competition organisers, many of the entries received for the 2004 competition were of a strikingly high standard.

"We were delighted at the level and quality of the work for this, the first international competition of its kind.

Plans for the next competition are already underway, and we’re looking forward to launching this and the International Manga and Anima Festival 2005 at London’s County Hall later this year."