Atsushi Wada earned the award of The Silver Bear for the Best Short Film (Jury Prize) with "The Great Rabbit” anime short at the Berlin International Film Festival this weekend. Wada directed the seven-minute short with French backing, and it had its world premiere during the February 9-19 festival. The festival program describes the short:

A magical animation that is also a profound conundrum. Once we called the noble, profound and mysterious existence The Great. But we have moved with the times and our thoughts and consciousness have changed. "If you believe in the Rabbit, you'll believe in anything. If you don't believe in the Rabbit, it means that you wouldn't believe anything."

Isamu Hirabayashi's "663114" anime short also received a Special Mention honor in the Generation 14plus category by the Youth Jury. Here is the synopsis of the eight-minute short:

Every sixty-six years a cicada makes its way out of the earth and climbs up a tree to shed its skin. This is the way it's been since time immemorial. But this time it's different. A Japanese animation film in which an ostensibly resistant insect's monologue draws a parallel between the catastrophes of Hiroshima and Fukushima. The insect poses a fundamental question about the future of our planet. A film that takes different point of view. Short but hard-hitting.

"663114" won the Noburou Oofuji Award, which honors animated works that offer new forms of creative expression, at the Mainichi Film Awards last month. It ran at the 68th Venice Film Festival in September and at the 2011 Vancouver International Film Festival in October. The short then appeared at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival in January.