27/08/2012 - The so-far most extensive showcase of Norwegian animation on show at Japan’s Hiroshima International Animation Festival, which ends today

Norwegian director Ivo Caprino's fully-animated Pinchcliffe Grand Prix, which has since 1975 sold an estimated 5.5 million tickets in a country with a 4.9 million population, is still Norway’s most popular film – but there is more to Norwegian animation. When festival director Sayoko Kinoshita, of Japan's Hiroshima International Animation Festival, visited the Norwegian Film Institute earlier this year to select Norwegian animated films, she chose 200 for the programme.

The animated commercials, shorts, music videos, television series, features, and students films produced between 1917-2012 are screening in a special sidebar – the most extensive presentation of Norwegian animation anywhere – at this year's festival, which ends today (August 27). The films are accompanied by 32 Norwegian directors and producers, who have also joined a networking programme in Hiroshima and Tokyo.

Norwegian directors Kine Aune and Anita Killi (whose Angry Man won the Japanese festival's competition in 2010) and Pjotr Sapegin (whose One Day a Man Bought a House (1999) took Hiroshima's own prize in 2000) will have their own retrospectives. The Mikrofilm and Pravdaproduction houses will have separate series; the selection includes Caprino's animated shorts and Torill Kove's The Danish Poet (2006), which scooped the Oscar.

Meanwhile, Norwegian director Rasmus A. Sivertsen and producer Cornelia Boysen, of Maipo Film & TV Produksjon AS, have returned to the 1950s universe of Pinchcliffe Grand Prix and Norwegian author and cartoonist Kjell Aukrust Alvdal for Solan and Ludvig: Christmas in Pinchcliffe, a stop-motion animated feature that will be ready by November next year.