Kihachirō Kawamoto (川本 喜八郎, Kawamoto Kihachirō, January 11, 1925 – August 23, 2010)[1] was a Japanese puppet designer and maker, independent film director, screenwriter and animator and president of the Japan Animation Association from 1989, succeeding founder Osamu Tezuka,[5] until his own death.

Since beginning his career in his early twenties as a production design assistant under So Matsuyama[6] in the art department of Toho in 1946,[1] he met Tadasu Iizawa and left the film studio in 1950 to collaborate with him on illustrating children's literature with photographs of dolls in dioramas, many of which have been republished in English editions by such American publishers as Grosset & Dunlap and Western Publishing's Golden Books imprint,[6] and trained in the art of stop motion filmmaking under Tadahito Mochinaga and, later, Jiří Trnka.

Okamoto's last film, The Restaurant of Many Orders (注文の多い料理店, Chūmon no Ōi Ryōriten, 1991), was left incomplete following his death during its production.

Trnka encouraged Kawamoto to draw on his own country's rich cultural heritage in his work, and so Kawamoto returned from Czechoslovakia to make a series of highly individual, independently produced artistic short works, beginning with Breaking of Branches is Forbidden (Hana-Ori) in 1968.

In 2003, he was responsible for overseeing the Winter Days (Fuyu no Hi) project, in which 35 of the world's top animators each worked on a two-minute segment inspired by the renka couplets of celebrated poet Matsuo Bashō.