Makoto Shinkai makes teenage longing convincing by taking ordinary places as seriously as the teenagers who inhabit them. We value his warmth and eye for light; his busy plots sometimes demand feelings the romances have not earned.
Fi1m perspective
Sunlight catches the leaves in hard white flares; rain makes tarmac shine. In Suzume (2022), Shinkai and cinematographer Ryosuke Tsuda give these passing sights as much care as the strange door standing in a deserted spa. That attention to familiar surroundings is central to why his fantasies work. We believe that these places matter before he puts them in danger.
The self-produced science-fiction short Voices of a Distant Star (2002) established his reputation, and 5 Centimeters per Second (2007) refined his interest in drifting relationships. In Your Name. (2016), that interest takes the form of a teenage body-swap romance. Weathering with You (2019) brings climate into another story of longing, while Suzume sends its heroine across Japan to shut doors that let earthquakes in. The scale has grown, but he still asks us to care first about a young person's feelings.
In Your Name., Shinkai lets Taki and Mitsuha be awkward in each other’s bodies before asking their feelings to support a larger mystery. As editor, he keeps the comic exchanges brisk, although he sometimes repeats a joke after it has done its work. Sharing the cinematography credit with Hitomi Fukuzawa, he makes the buildings and open skies worth watching in their own right. We felt unexpectedly wistful looking at those backgrounds, because their detail made ordinary surroundings seem worth missing. The music, with Yojiro Noda among its contributors, keeps things moving, though sometimes it urges us to feel more intensely than we need to.
Suzume is crowded and its romance thin, but Shinkai finds a useful corrective to solemnity in Souta, the young man transformed into a three-legged chair. Hokuto Matsumura’s grave voice accompanies a piece of furniture that clatters downstairs and runs along a quayside; the comedy works because the performance refuses to make the joke for us. The earthquake warning on the characters’ phones is a different matter, a real alarm bringing the earthquake and tsunami of 11 March 2011 into the fantasy. Shinkai’s fast cutting keeps the journey moving, sometimes before a scene has had time to settle. For a first encounter, choose Your Name. and be patient when the plot gets busy.
Biography
Makoto Shinkai is a Japanese film director, screenwriter, editor and novelist. Born Makoto Niitsu on 9 February 1973 in Koumi, Nagano, he studied Japanese literature at Chuo University.
He began his career as a video game animator at Nihon Falcom in 1996. Recognition followed with the 1999 short She and Her Cat, after which he founded CoMix Wave Films. Early works include the 2002 OVA Voices of a Distant Star and the 2004 feature The Place Promised in Our Early Days.
Shinkai is best known for the features Your Name. (2016), Weathering with You (2019) and Suzume (2022), on which he also served as editor. The films form part of a series frequently termed the “Disaster trilogy” and rank among Japan’s highest-grossing releases.
