Kihachirō Kawamoto(川本 喜八郎Kawamoto Kihachirō, January 11, 1925 – August 23, 2010) was a Japanese designer and maker of puppets, an animator, writer and director of independently-made stop motion films and president of the Japan Animation Association, succeeding founder Osamu Tezuka, from 1989 until his own death. He is best-remembered in Japan as designer of the puppets for the long-running NHK live action television series of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms in the early 1980s and The Tale of the Heike in the 1990s but better-known internationally for his own animated short films, the majority of which are model animation but which also include the cutout animation Tabi and Shijin no Shōgai and mixed media, French-language Farce anthropo-cynique.