Koji Yamamura handpicks animated shorts for The Yokohama Arts Foundation

by Chris MaGee

We've talked about and reported on award-winning independent animator Koji Yamamura on the Pow-Wow blog before (here's one of our first stories), but the folks over at Anime News Network posted a really neat bit of news about Yamamura last week that I've been dying to share with you.

Yamamura has teamed up with the Yokohama Arts Foundation to curate an online exhibition of promising young animators posted on YouTube. Thuis far there are 7 films by the likes of Atsushi Wada, Ayaka Nakata, Saori Shiroki, Ryo Okawara, Masaki Okuda, Wataru Uekusa, and Masahi Yokota, but the good news is that the even more films will be added to Yokohama Arts Foundation's YouTube channel, one film per month actually, until March 2010, so that's three more films.

There's great stuff to be seen here, but my two favorites have to be Masahi Yokota's "Ikuemi no Zanzō" and Atsushi Wada's "Hana no Hi (Day of Nose)" (above) which I was lucky enough to see previously at this summer's Seconds Under The Sun, a night of experimental Japanese animation curated by my friend Naomi Hocura.

Check out "Ikuemi no Zanzō" below and then head over to the Yokohama Arts Foundation's YouTube channel to see all of the films.