The Ceremony That Happened Anyway

Five days after the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami struck northeastern Japan on March 11, 2011, organizers announced that year's Tokyo International Anime Fair was cancelled outright. The venue itself had taken damage. For the first time in a decade, there was no fair at Tokyo Big Sight that spring.

The tenth Tokyo Anime Award still found its winners. Animation of the Year went to The Secret World of Arrietty, and Hiromasa Yonebayashi won Best Director for it, his feature directorial debut at Studio Ghibli after years animating for Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata. Sometimes a career-defining night happens even when the room it was supposed to happen in doesn't exist.

Art Direction stayed in the family too. Yoji Takeshige, the same art director behind Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle, and Summer Wars, won again for Arrietty, his fourth credit on this award's pages. Cécile Corbel, a French singer-songwriter who wrote the film's score in Breton folk style, won Best Music, an unusual pick for a ceremony that mostly rewarded Japanese composers.

Television went to K-On!! and The Tatami Galaxy, a pairing about as different as this ceremony gets: a high school band comedy next to a surreal, time-looping campus drama. Aki Toyosaki, the voice of K-On!'s Yui, won Best Voice Actor.

Two Merit Awards closed out the night, one for director Tomoharu Katsumata and one shared between veteran voice actors Miyoko Asou and Ichiro Nagai. No fair, no gala floor, and the ceremony still made room to honor a lifetime of work.