With the 2019 Tokyo Film Festival having come to a close, we take a look at how anime was represented at the event

In today's world of visual entertainment, it's hard to argue that Japan has any stronger export than animation.

The Tokyo International Film Festival (TIFF), which this year ran from Oct. 28 to Nov. 5, seems to be waking up to that fact. From 2014 to 2018, the festival ran special anime retrospectives focused on a single director or franchise, from Hideaki Anno ("Neon Genesis Evangelion") to Keiichi Hara ("Miss Hokusai").

But this year, TIFF tried something different, creating a permanent Japanese Animation section. It's an acknowledgement that anime isn't going anywhere soon (and, perhaps paradoxically, that they'd run out of working anime directors with large bodies of work to spotlight).