Hokkaido’s New Chitose International Airport is celebrating animation with the New Chitose Airport International Animation Festival. For its 4th iteration, they are once again inviting animators from all over the globe to participate.

The airport will host the festival from 2nd – 5th November this year. But before that, the festival will open submissions for their Animated Short Film competition on 17 April 2017. The winner of that Grand Prix competition will then receive 1,000,000 yen in cash!

The official website describes the festival as:

“New Chitose Airport International Animation Festival” which is the world’s first self-contained “airport film festival” was held in 2014 for the first time. Its main theme is “animation” considered as an international culture nowadays. Last year, the festival received over 1,100 applications for the competition and had more than 33,000 visitors from all over the world for four days. The one of the world’s most unique events achieved a great success. We will carry out new measures not only for promoting our film festival but also the beauty of animation. The measures include the Invitation of popular guests and multiple approaches to ignite people’s interest in various cultures and entertainments under the theme of animation. Those attempts will create a new forum for international exchanges and encounters among animators. The festival has been getting controversial among people in animation world because our goal is to accomplish “promotion by the airport as a whole, film festival can be held only in the airport” and make use of the cinema, event hall, hotel, spa and other facilities within the airport as much as possible. Recently the number of foreign travelers from Asia have been increasing. Our festival aims for an expansion of international routes of New Chitose Airport by involving more Asian countries in this big event and promoting their animation. We believe our continuous efforts will lead to the contribution for the cultural, economic and distribution field of all Hokkaido.

Aside from the usual competitions, the festival also holds screenings for several anime films. Last year, the festival screened several films, including One Piece Film Gold and In This Corner of the World. They also showcase internationally-made animated films, as well as a few independent local ones.

For more details about the competition, please visit their official website: http://airport-anifes.jp/en/