The candidates for the 56th Seiun Award have been announced.
The Media category includes a few anime, including the Brave Bang Bravern! and Train to the End of the World series and the Dead Dead Demon’s Dededede Destruction movie. There is also a manga/anime-adjacent live-action candidate in the form of the Cells at Work! movie.
Meanwhile, the Comic category includes Koukaku no Pandora, Taiyoukei SF Bouken Taizen Supeope, Asteroid in Love, A Chef of Nobunaga, Engaged to the Unidentified, Man Bite, and Land of the Lustrous.
Other anime/manga-related candidates include:
• Illustrator You Shiina (Ascendance of a Bookworm light novels) — Art Category
• Manga artist and animator Kia Asamiya (Silent Möbius manga) — Art Category
• Mechanical designer Kazutaka Miyatake (The Super Dimension Fortress Macross) — Art Category
• Illustrator umegrafix Ryuji Umeno (Space Battleship Yamato Reimei-hen co-illustrator) — Art Category
• Kakuhito, Yoshikazu Yasuhiko-ten (exhibition featuring the art of Mobile Suit Gundam character designer and animation director Yoshikazu Yasuhiko)
The winners will be announced in mid-July, and the awards ceremony will be held on August 30 and 31 JST.
The Seiun Award is an annual award for science fiction and adjacent genres that dates back to 1970. The nominees are chosen from works and activities that were released/held in the previous year (generally speaking, the manga above released their final tankoubon volumes in 2024; however, there are a couple of discrepancies, such as Taiyoukei SF Bouken Taizen Supeope Volume 8 being listed with a release date of December 26, 2023 JST by the publisher instead of the Seiun website’s January 9, 2024 JST date).
Those voting for the 56th Seiun Award have to have applied for or registered for attendance for this year’s Nihon SF Taikai convention. Voting will take place from May 11 JST to June 30 JST.
Last year saw Delicious in Dungeon winning Best Comic at the 55th Seiun Award.
Source: Seiun website
