Tadanari Okamoto

Who was Tadanari Okamoto?

Tadanari Okamoto was a Japanese independent animator. From 1965 until his death he completed at least 37 short subject films in a wide variety of mediums, eight of which have been awarded the Ōfuji Noburō Prize at the Mainichi Film Awards and his films have altogether earned at least 24 other awards internationally. His work is also the subject a two-hour-long documentary The Magic Ballet, released in 1990, and in 2003 four of his films placed in a list of the best 150 animated films and series as voted for by practitioners and critics of animation from around the world in a survey commissioned by Tokyo's Laputa Animation Festival: most notably with The Magic Fox, which came twenty-eighth.

After working at MOM Production, known for its stop motion work for Rankin/Bass, he founded his own production company, Echo Incorporated, in 1964, and soon after made a trip to visit Czech animator and director Břetislav Pojar. One of his last films, "Metropolitan Museum", was commissioned and broadcast across the nation by NHK, the national public broadcasting organization of Japan, as one of their Minna no Uta interstitial programs. He died during the production of The Restaurant of Many Orders, an adaptation of the Kenji Miyazawa story of the same name for which he enlisted the talents of Reiko Okuyama, a former Tōei Dōga animator and animation director who had for many years abandoned animation in favour of illustration, including copperplate engraving, to aid in realising the engraving-inspired visual style envisioned for the film. Posthumously completed under the supervision of Kihachirō Kawamoto, it débuted in 1991 and was awarded with, amongst others, that year's Ōfuji Noburō and Minister of Education prizes and prompted a special lifetime achievement Mainichi Film Award for Okamoto.