From 1965 until his death he completed at least 37 short subject films in a wide variety of mediums, many of them winning award-winning, his honorific nicknamed "Sheldon Cohen and Hans Fischerkoesen of Japan".
[1] His work is also the subject a two-hour-long documentary The Magic Ballet, released in 1990,[2] and in 2003 four of his films placed in a list of the best 150 animated films and series as voted for by practitioners and critics of animation from around the world in a survey commissioned by Tokyo's Laputa Animation Festival: most notably with The Magic Fox (おこんじょうるり, Okon Jōruri, literally "The Ballad Drama of Okon", 1982), which came twenty-eighth.
[4] He died during the production of The Restaurant of Many Orders (注文の多い料理店, Chūmon no Ōi Ryōriten, also known as "A Well-ordered Restaurant"), an adaptation of the Kenji Miyazawa story of the same name for which he enlisted the talents of Reiko Okuyama, a former Tōei Dōga animator and animation director who had for many years abandoned animation in favour of illustration, including copperplate engraving, to aid in realising the engraving-inspired visual style envisioned for the film.
[5] Posthumously completed under the supervision of Kihachirō Kawamoto, it débuted in 1991 and was awarded with, amongst others, that year's Ōfuji Noburō and Minister of Education prizes (the latter being an NHK Japan Prize for achievement in an audiovisual work relevant to primary education)[6] and prompted a special lifetime achievement Mainichi Film Award for Okamoto.
[1] A selection of Okamoto's films was released on Laserdisc on August 24, 1986 and re-released on September 25, 1994.