Tokyo CINEMASTERS International Film Festival opens its call for animated shorts
Skwigly
The Tokyo CINEMASTERS International Film Festival (TCIF) is now accepting animated short films for its Best Animated Short award. The festival’s 4th edition takes place on November 11, 2026 at J:COM Urayasu Concert Hall, a 303-seat theatre-style concert hall just outside Tokyo, where the selected films are screened on the big screen and the category winners are announced on the night.
Animation is one of TCIF’s four competitive categories, alongside Drama, Horror and Narrative Music Video, and carries its own award. The festival welcomes animated shorts under 40 minutes in length. There is no premiere requirement: films that have already screened at other festivals or been released online are fully eligible.
Why Tokyo? Japan is one of the most animation-literate audiences in the world, and one where watching subtitled films is simply the norm. Yet the international animation that reaches Japanese screens is overwhelmingly commercial, and independent animated shorts from abroad rarely get the chance to meet an audience here. TCIF was founded in the hope of opening even a small door there — a place where a good film is recognized simply as a good film, regardless of language, nationality or career stage.
For animators — the essentials:
- Category: Best Animated Short
- Length: under 40 minutes
- No premiere requirement
- Non-English films need English subtitles
- Multiple entries and multiple categories allowed
- Deadline: October 31, 2026, 23:59 JST
- Submit via FilmFreeway: https://filmfreeway.com/cinema
sters (fees listed there) - Full guidelines: https://cinemasters.jp/entry
Japanese audiences probably know animation better than anyone, and yet almost none of the independent animated shorts being made around the world ever screen here. We started Tokyo CINEMASTERS so that an animated short made somewhere in the world — by one person working alone, a small team, or an established studio — can be seen on a big screen in Japan, by an audience that genuinely loves the form. We don’t ask for premieres — we just want to see the work.
Teppei Nakamura, Festival Director
Short Film Bank
Separately from the festival, TCIF also runs the Short Film Bank, an IMDb-style searchable database for short films. Animators can list their work there for free, past films included, with credits and synopsis, searchable by director, genre and country: https://cinemasters.jp/films