Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Ofuji Noburo Award is an animation prize presented at the Mainichi Film Awards in Japan. It was established in 1962 to recognize excellence in animation, with a particular focus on shorter and independent animated works.
Noburō Ōfuji was a pioneering Japanese animator who specialized in silhouette animation and was one of the earliest Japanese animators to gain international recognition, winning at the 1952 Cannes Film Festival and the 1956 Venice Film Festival. The Mainichi Film Awards created the prize in his honor following his death in 1961.
The inaugural Ofuji Noburo Award in 1962 was won by Osamu Tezuka, the artist widely regarded as the father of manga and anime.
The Animation Grand Award was established in 1989 because big-budget studio productions had come to dominate the Ofuji Award in the 1980s, overshadowing the independent animators the prize was originally created to support. Moving large-scale theatrical releases into the new category allowed the Ofuji Award to return its focus to shorter and more personal work.
Hayao Miyazaki has won the Ofuji Award at least twice, for Ponyo in 2008 and for The Boy and the Heron in 2023. He also received the first Animation Grand Award in 1989.
The Ofuji Award encompasses a wide range of animation forms including stop motion. Kihachirō Kawamoto, a stop-motion specialist, won the award multiple times, and Russian filmmaker Aleksandr Petrov won in 1999 for The Old Man and the Sea, a paint-on-glass animated film.