The Annecy Cristal Award Goes to PIG: The Dam Keeper

At the 2018 Annecy International Animated Film Festival held on Saturday, there was only one Japanese work that won an award this year. That work was Erick Oh and Tonko House’s “PIG: The Dam Keeper Poems: “Yellow Flower” and “Hello Nice to Meet You"The United States and Japan collaboration which won the “Cristal for a TV Production” award in the TV Films category

The Annecy International Animated Film Festival is an event that was created in 1960. It takes place at the beginning of June in the town of Annecy, France and initially began as an event that took place every two years. The festival became an annual event in 1981 and is one of the four international animated film festivals sponsored by the Association Internationale du Film d’Animation (or ASIFA, the International Animated Film Association).

It also became known as the world’s oldest and largest animation film festival. For this year, the festival ran from June 11-16 at the French community of the same name and had 11,700 badge holders, which was 17% more than in 2017.

In the festival, a variety of cartoon films compete against one another in different categories including:

Feature films
Short films
Films produced for television and advertising
Student films
Films made for the internet (since 2002)

This year, no Japanese works competed in the Off-Limits Short Films, Perspectives Short Films, Young Audiences Short Films, and Commissioned Films categories.

The first episode of Production I.G and Kazuto Nakazawa’s “B: The Beginning” anime did, however, compete in the TV FIlms category. And Ryoji Yamada’s “Hunter” short film competed in the Short Films category while Yosuke Tani’s “Kaiju Shinwa” (“Quest of the Battling Gods”) animated short competed in the Graduation Short Film category.

On a different note, the festival featured the screening of Mamoru Hosoda and Studio Chizu’s “Mirai”/“Mirai of the Future” and Kitaro Kosaka and DLE/Madhouse’s “Okko’s Inn”/“Waka Okami wa Shōgakusei!”

In last year’s festival, the top “Cristal for a Feature Film” award went to “Lu over the wall”. This was the first Japanese film to win the award in 22 years. Other than this, the “In This Corner of the World” anime film and Sawako Kabuki’s “Natsu no gero wa huyu no sakana”/“Summer’s Puke is Winter’s Delight” short film also won awards.

Source: AnimeNewsNetwork