1.Prologue
In CINEMA & THEATRE #045, I wrote about Hosoda Mamoru, the director of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and Summer Wars. His work incorporates sci-fi concepts such as time travel, advanced computer networks, and virtual spaces, not because they are interesting in and of themselves, but because of how they force his protagonists to face their reality, and ultimately drive them to grow. Instead, what stays with the audience are the depictions of contemporary Japanese society and quintessential Japanese landscapes. Japanese audiences leave feeling nostalgic for a past they might never have known firsthand and aware of familial ties that they have come to take for granted.
For foreign fans of anime, Hosoda’s works offer a glimpse into daily Japanese life—something different from the more stereotypically weird and exotic depictions of the culture purveyed by anime less grounded in reality. Their slice-of-life nature has even drawn comparisons to the director Ozu Yasujiro. When it comes to foreigners’ knowledge of Japanese filmmakers, it’s Kurosawa Akira first, Miyazaki Hayao second, Kitano Takeshi third, and Ozu Yasujiro fourth. Kurosawa is associated with historical films, Miyazaki is synonymous with children’s anime, and Kitano is seen as a filmmaker interested in violent portrayals of the yakuza underworld. By default, any film that depicts daily Japanese life gets compared to Ozu Yasujiro. To be sure, it’s a flattering comparison for any Japanese filmmaker.
If Hosoda Mamoru was the champion of slice-of-life anime between the late 2000s and early 2010s, it was Shinkai Makoto who took over the mantle from the mid 2010s onwards. On the internet and in foreign circles, he has been touted as the new Miyazaki for his sensitive portrayals of the delicate state of mind of adolescence. Again, because Miyazaki Hayao is the best—and sometimes only—known anime director overseas, all Japanese animators at one time or another are destined to be compared and contrasted with the master of children’s fantasies.
Shinkai made his international breakthrough with 2016’s Your Name, which was both a massive commercial as well as critical success. In terms of domestic Japanese box office it made 234 million dollars as of July 2017, becoming fourth on the all-time list, after Spirited Away (289 million dollars), Titanic (246 million dollars), and Frozen (239 million dollars). In terms of global box office it made 361 million dollars, surpassing Spirited Away (275 million dollars) to become the number one grossing Japanese movie of all time.
In the last installment of our series on internationally renowned anime directors, we put the spotlight on Shinkai Makoto.
2.Shinkai Makoto: The Next Miyazaki?
Shinkai was born in 1973 in Nagano Prefecture, where his family runs a 111-year-old construction company. He was into sci-fi (especially stories set in outer space) from a young age, and his favorite books included From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne and A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. Into games and electronics, he convinced his parents to buy a PC for him, and he spent much of his time playing around on it.
After graduating from high school, Shinkai enrolled in Chuo University, where he majored in literature. He belonged to the children’s literature club, where he began making picture books. He also began working part time at the Tachikawa-based game company Nihon Falcom. After graduating, he initially intended to join a Tokyo company his father had referred him to in order to groom him to succeed the family business, but Shinkai ended up joining Nihon Falcom full time instead. There he designed product packaging and advertising materials, and later produced opening movies and promotional videos for the company’s games.
For five years while he worked at Nihon Falcom, Shinkai would come home every night and work on personal animation projects until late at night. In 2001, he quit his job to focus on animation full time; his first job was creating the opening animation for a series of adult video games. In 2002, he made his directorial debut with the animated short Voices of a Distant Star. Shinkai garnered attention for writing, storyboarding, and directing the entire film practically by himself.
Shinkai made his feature-length debut with 2004’s The Place Promised in Our Early Days, which beat out Miyazaki Hayao’s Howl’s Moving Castle and Oshii Mamoru’s Innocence to win the Mainichi Film Award for Best Animation Film. In 2007, he released 5 Centimeters per Second, which won best animated film at the Asia-Pacific Film Festival as well as the top prize at the Future Film Festival in Italy. Then in 2011 he released Children Who Chase Lost Voices, which divided his fans with its more fantastical tone and use of action scenes. The mixed reception would help Shinkai realize that the success of a film depended on much more than just drawing and animating pictures—a film needed to be produced.
By around 2010, Shinkai had already become an animator to watch in the eyes of anime fans both at home and abroad, but he would get his first big hit with 2013’s The Garden of Words, which made more than 280,000 dollars on opening weekend and ended up making an estimated 1.4 million dollars domestically. At the 2013 Fantasia International Film Festival it shared the Satoshi Kon Award for Achievement in Animation and won the Audience Award for Best Animation Feature. Shinkai would follow it up with the even more successful Your Name in 2016.
●Shinkai Makoto Picks
3.Anime Before and After the Turn of the Millennium
As we’ve seen in this series on internationally renowned Japanese animation filmmakers, anime in the 80s and 90s was all about serious, gritty, heavy sci-fi tales like Akira, Ghost in the Shell, and Neon Genesis Evangelion. These films exposed a new generation of Western audiences to anime, elevating the form from children’s entertainment to pop culture for adults.
In the late 2000s and 2010s, Hosoda Mamoru and Shinkai Makoto produced a softer kind of sci-fi grounded in contemporary Japanese society. Devices such as time travel are used only insofar as they help characters discover things about themselves and others, and grow as people. In their hands, sci-fi is just a storytelling tool—a means to an end.
Unlike sci-fi anime set in fictional locations or Miyazaki films set in vaguely European locales, Hosoda and Shinkai mostly set their films in real-life locations in Japan. Hosoda’s The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is mostly set in the Shitamachi area of Tokyo, whereas Summer Wars is set in the rural area of Ueda in Nagano Prefecture. Shinkai’s The Garden of Words is mainly set in Shinjuku Gyoen, while Your Name is set in Tokyo and in Hida Takayama in Gifu Prefecture. Geography and regionality actually plays a central role in Your Name, and unsurprisingly it has inspired travel sites to put together itineraries for walking around the film’s locations. Both Hosoda and Shinkai depict everyday things like railroad crossings and convenience stores with painstaking detail, bringing a striking sense of reality and three-dimensionality to their films.
In that regard, Matsumoto Taiyo and Inoue Santa also draw environments heavily based on real-life Tokyo locations.
In terms of themes, the anime of the postwar era to the late 20th century were about big concepts like war, peace, the environment, and technology. They asked fundamental, philosophical questions like “What does it mean to be human?". Anime in the 21st century, by contrast, focuses more on the internal struggles and emotional turmoil of its characters as they try to be honest with themselves and those around them. In other words, anime is increasingly becoming inward looking and concerned with matters of the heart. The question “Your name?" could not be any less philosophical.
4.Epilogue
How has Japanese animation evolved in the postwar era, when looked at from an outsider’s perspective?
Disney-influenced works like Tezuka Osamu’s Astro Boy and Tatsunoko Production’s Speed Racer started a tradition of children’s anime that would pave the way for series like Dragon Ball, Pokemon, Naruto, and One Piece.
Later, sci-fi anime like Akira and Ghost in the Shell would establish that anime could tackle adult themes with nuance. Audiences recognized these films as having not just entertainment value, but also artistic value.
In the 21st century, anime became more and more about stories of adolescence and young love, parent-child and familial relationships. In other words, it seems anime has reached its Y.A. phase.
The specter of World War II always loomed behind the anime of the 60s and 70s. Japan’s defeat had left its national identity—and pride—in tatters, and tackling themes like peace and justice in a technologically advanced setting was actually a way to reckon with and reconcile its past. Following Japan’s economic miracle, the bubble era of the late 80s was a time when the Japanese people shared the view that technology would improve society and perhaps even save the world. Japan had finally reestablished an identity for itself: “Japan as No. 1." Sci-fi allowed manga artists and filmmakers to imagine that Japan would remain a world power hundreds of years into the future.
Anime from the 2000s onwards has shifted its focus to the here and now. This reflects the current state of Japanese society—the people have lost hope in the future, lost touch with the past, and allowed communal bonds to wither. People now lead their lives day-to-day, overwhelmed with the tasks before them and unable to envision what lies ahead. The arson incident at Kyoto Animation is an encapsulation of all of Japanese society’s troubles. With the COVID-19 pandemic, these trends will likely only become more pronounced.
