MUMBAI: Well-known Japanese animation director Satoshi Kon better known for Tokyo Godfathers and Millennium Actress among other award winning films expired d of pancreatic cancer at the age of 46 last Tuesday.

Considered one of Japan‘s most exciting animation film directors, oKon was born in 1963 on the island of Hokkaido and debuted as a comic book artiste when he was 23 while still an art student at Musashino Art University near Tokyo. He began making animated films about 1990, establishing a style that blurred the boundaries of reality and fantasy.

In his Oscar-nominated 2003 film Tokyo Godfathers, Kon featured three homeless people instead of three cowboys, breaking with the clean and ritzy image of the Japanese capital.

The 2006 film Paprika based on a novel by popular writer Yasutaka Tsutsui, used breathtaking cutting-edge animation and won a prize at the Brussels anime festival in 2007.

Kon was working on his first children‘s film The Dreaming Machine at the time of his death.