Tokyo Anime Award Festival 2015

Part of Tokyo's promotional push in the run-up to 2020, this freshly minted international anime film festival returns for its second edition, with awards to be given out in the categories of Feature Animation, Short Animation and Anime of the Year. Screenings will take place at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi between March 19 and 23, while a number of talks, seminars and other events are also on the calendar. Unfortunately enough, the programme looks rather underwhelming: there's nothing new about most of the films shown here, the Anime of the Year selection seems to have been put together solely based on box office numbers, and 2014 hit How to Train Your Dragon 2 has been set as the opening movie (why?). As of right now, the TAAF looks more like a lukewarm PR exercise than a real film festival. The programme can be viewed here – in Japanese only.