Japan Animation Film Wins Top Award in French Festival

Paris, June 17 (Jiji Press)--Japanese animation movie "Yoake Tsugeru Lu no Uta" (Lu over the Wall) won the top Cristal award for a feature film at the annual Annecy international animation movie festival on Saturday. The work, directed by Masaaki Yuasa, is the first Japanese animation feature fim that has been given the top award since 1995, when the prize went to Isao Takahata's "Heisei Tanuki Gassen Pompoko." This year, Sunao Katabuchi's "Kono Sekai no Katasumi ni" (In This Corner of the World), also received the Jury award, the second highest for a feature film. Yuasa's work is a story of a music-loving boy in a fishing village who becomes a friend of Lu, a mermaid, and tries hard to save his town from a crisis. The other film is about the life of a young woman who married a man in Kure, Hiroshima Prefecture, during World War II. END