The awards record

A Farewell and a Reckoning Share the Stage

The 24th Tokyo Anime Award Festival honored two of the most acclaimed anime of their year: one about outliving everyone you love, the other about never getting the chance to.

Toshima Civic Center, Ikebukuro · March 10, 2025 · Concluded

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Award Results

Look Back & Frieren: Beyond Journey's End

Grand Prix

A Story About Outliving Everyone You Love, and One About Never Getting the Chance To

Frieren: Beyond Journey's End took Animation of the Year, Television, a slow, contemplative fantasy about an elf mage processing grief and the weight of time long after her adventuring party has passed away. It became one of the most acclaimed anime of the decade almost as soon as it aired, and this win confirmed what most of the industry already believed.

Look Back took Animation of the Year, Film. Director Kiyotaka Oshiyama's adaptation of Tatsuki Fujimoto's one-shot manga follows two young manga artists across years of ambition, friendship, and loss, and Oshiyama also picked up Best Director for it, translating a quiet story onto the screen without losing what made it devastating on the page.

At the ceremony, jury member Suresh Eriyat spoke about needing "stories of hope, messages of repair and unity, rather than division," a fitting note for a year that also handed the Anime Fan Award to The Birth of Kitaro: The Mystery of GeGeGe. Best Art Direction went to Mai Ichioka, Best Music to Evan Call for his Frieren score, and Best Animator to Touko Yatabe.

Sidebar

Grief, Slowed All the Way Down

Frieren spends its runtime on an elf mage who has to reckon with how briefly her human companions lived compared to her. The show's patience with that idea is a big part of why it resonated so widely.

Sidebar

A One-Shot Manga Becomes a Best Director Win

Look Back started as a single standalone chapter by Tatsuki Fujimoto. Kiyotaka Oshiyama's film adaptation kept its scale intentionally small, and it earned him Best Director for the restraint.

The haul chart