Makoto Shinkai 's Weathering With You ( Tenki no Ko ) film won the Audience Award along with Zabou Breitman and Elea Gobbe-Mevellec's The Swallows of Kabul film at the Animation Is Film Festival in Los Angeles this past weekend. The film's October 18 screening at the festival was the film's United States premiere, with director Shinkai and producer Genki Kawamura appearing in person.

Jérémy Clapin's I Lost My Body film won the Grand Prize during the October 18-20 festival.

The festival also hosted the North American premiere of the Children of the Sea film, the West Coast premiere of the Ride Your Wave film, and a screening of the Cencoroll Connect anime. Aside from Weathering With You , Children of the Sea and Ride Your Wave screened in competition. Children of the Sea director Ayumu Watanabe also attended the festival.

Weathering With You opened in 359 theaters and 448 screens in Japan on July 19. The film sold 1,159,020 tickets for 1,643,809,400 yen (about US$15.22 million) in its first three days in 358 theaters. The film ranked #1 in its opening weekend. The film has so far sold a total of 10.27 million tickets to earn 13,738,922,000 yen (about US$126 million) since opening. The film is now the #7 highest-earning domestic film of all time in Japan and the highest-grossing film in Japan this year.

GKIDS has licensed the film for North America, and will give the film an "awards qualifying" theatrical run this year before a wider screening with subtitles and an English dub beginning on January 17.

GKIDS describes the film:

The summer of his high school freshman year, Hodaka runs away from his remote island home to Tokyo, and quickly finds himself pushed to his financial and personal limits. The weather is unusually gloomy and rainy every day, as if to suggest his future. He lives his days in isolation, but finally finds work as a writer for a mysterious occult magazine. Then one day, Hodaka meets Hina on a busy street corner. This bright and strong­willed girl possesses a strange and wonderful ability: the power to stop the rain and clear the sky...

Source: IndieWire (Bill Desowitz)