Satoshi Kon Winsor McCay Award Recipient 2020

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The Winsor McCay Award, named for the most influential of character animation pioneers, was the first Annie Award established by ASIFA-Hollywood and is awarded to a maximum of three individuals annually in recognition of lifetime or career contributions in direction, animation, design, writing, voice acting, sound and sound effects, technical expertise, music, education, or for other endeavors which exhibit an outstanding devotion to and promotion of excellence in the art of animation.

SATOSHI KON
Satoshi Kon will long be remembered as a unique and visionary filmmaker. He was born in 1963 in Sapporo, Japan, and from his teenage years aspired to be an animator. A fan of the work of Hayao Miyazaki, Isao Takahata, Leiji Matsumoto, and Yoshiuki Tomino, he studied graphic design at Musashino Art University. While still in college, Kon began to work as a manga artist and before long moved into animation, working as a layout artist and animator for the film Roujin Z (1991). In 1993, after scripting an episode of the video series Jo-Jo’s Bizarre Adventure, he assumed the director’s chair for the 1997 animated thriller Perfect Blue. The film that is considered the first of Satoshi’s masterpieces, Millennium Actress, which he wrote and directed, was released in 2001. He followed that with the features Tokyo Godfathers (2003) and Paprika (2006), the television series Paranoia Agent (2004), and the short Good Morning (2008). He was also one of the co-founders, in 2007, of the Japan Animation Creators Association. It was a shock to his friends and the animation industry at large when Satoshi Kon was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2010. He died in August of that year, at the tragically young age of 46. His last work, the feature film Dreaming Machine, remains incomplete -- because, in the words of producer Masao Maruyama, assigning another director to reach for the artistry and thematic depth of Satoshi Kon’s original contribution would seem like “only an imitation.”