Makoto Shinkai was born in 1973 in Koumi, Nagano Prefecture, in a small mountainous town that provided him with an early experience of distance and longing for connection that would become the emotional core of his work. He studied Japanese literature at Chuo University in Tokyo before joining a video game company — Falcom — as a graphic designer and beginning to make animated films in his spare time using consumer software. His first short film, She and Her Cat, made almost entirely by himself in 1999, was distributed online and won prizes, demonstrating that genuine artistic ambition could be realized outside the conventional animation studio system.
Voices of a Distant Star, a twenty-five-minute film released in 2002 and again almost entirely self-made, attracted enormous attention: the story of two middle school friends separated as one is recruited into a space military programme, sending and receiving messages across distances measured in light-years as years of their lives pass at different rates, is a perfectly constructed meditation on the way communication across distance transforms into communication across time. The film established the themes — longing, separation, the asymmetry of distances between people who care about each other — that would define Shinkai's subsequent work.
Your Name, released in 2016, was a cultural event of extraordinary scale. Two teenagers — a boy in Tokyo and a girl in a rural mountain town — begin inexplicably swapping bodies at intervals, leaving each other notes in the other's phone, gradually coming to know each other while unable to meet. The film's combination of formally inventive premise with breathtaking visual beauty (the Makoto Shinkai sky — those extraordinary clouds, that luminous light — is one of cinema's most recognizable aesthetic signatures) and genuine emotional devastation produced a worldwide response that made it, at the time of release, the highest-grossing anime film in history. The novels Shinkai writes to accompany his films — which function as independent works rather than simple tie-ins, developing aspects of the story that film cannot access — have found their own substantial readership.
Weathering With You and Suzume have continued his exploration of young people caught between the ordinary world and something mythological or cosmological that erupts into it, each film developing his visual and emotional vocabulary while reaching new formal ambitions. His position as the most commercially successful anime director since Miyazaki is now secure, but his work earns this position rather than inheriting it.
