Awards. He wrote that some people argued the fans were drawn to the anime as a form of escapism following the political events of 2016 among other factors, but he responded to this saying that: The problem with this reductive view is that it assumes Yuri!!! on Ice is anywhere near as lightweight and fluffy as its sparkly cover art might suggest. (It's also just a gilded version of the more common "only horny fangirls care about this" argument, meant to delegitimize the show's audience and therefore its merits as a work of art.) At the Tokyo Anime Award Festival in 2017, Yuri on Ice won Animation of the Year: Television Category and the fan-polled Anime Fan Award. Character designer Tadashi Hiramatsu won the award for Best Animator. In the 2017 Japan Character Awards presented by the Character Brand Licensing Association (CBLA), Yuri on Ice won the Japan Character Grand Prize New Face Award. The CBLA gave the show the prize for taking an unusual subject like figure skating and making it appeal to audiences, especially women, and predicted the show, "can continue to grow on a global level. Popularity The anime has attracted a large online following. According to the Kadokawa Ascii Research Laboratories content and information trend-analytics company, Yuri on Ice was the most-tweeted anime of the season (collecting 1,440,596 tweets). It had over a million tweets more than its closest rival, the volleyball-based anime Haikyu!! (which had 348,109 tweets). Since it started to include anime and manga in their statistics, Tumblr Fandometrics revealed that Yuri on Ice was the most talked about anime on their website starting as of May 1, 2017. It was also the fourth most talked about anime on Tumblr in 2016. Yuri on Ice was listed as the top 2016 anime on Crunchyroll for Poland, the Czech Republic, Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso, Malawi, Botswana, Taiwan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Laos, and Singapore; the most popular 2016 anime series for all countries via Crunchyroll was Re:Zero. Yuri on Ice was one of the three most watched anime on Crunchyroll, the others being JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond Is Unbreakable and the third season of Sailor Moon Crystal, and was also named the series "Most likely to be watched within an hour of release". A poll of 306,568 viewers by the video-hosting service Nico Nico Douga found that Yuri on Ice was the fourth-most-popular TV anime series