NEW YORK: Makoto Shinkai was never the same filmmaker after the 2011 earthquake stuck Japan.
When the tsunami and quake ravaged the Tōhoku region of northern Japan and prompted a nuclear meltdown, Shinkai, a now 50-year-old director and animator of some of the most popular anime features in the world, could feel his sense of storytelling crumbling.
“The shock to me was that the daily life that we had become accustomed to in Japan can suddenly be severed without any warning whatsoever,” says Shinkai. “I had this odd, foreboding feeling that that could happen again and again. I began to think about how I wanted to tell stories within this new reality.”
The three blockbusters that have followed by Shinkai – Your Name, Weathering With You and the new release Suzume – have each tethered hugely emotional tales to ecological disaster. In Your Name, a meteor threatens to demolish a village, an event that dovetails with a body-switching romance. In Weathering With You, a runaway teenage boy befriends a Tokyo girl who can control the weather, spawning fluctuations that mirror climate change.
Suzume, which opens in US theatres on Friday (Apr 14), returns to the earthquake of 2011. Suzume, whose mother perished in the tsunami, years later meets a mysterious young man responsible for racing to close portals – literal doorways that appear around Japan – before they unleash a giant, earthquake-causing worm.
“With these three films, I didn’t set out to make a disaster movie. I wanted to tell a love story, a romance, a coming-of-age of an adolescent girl,” Shinkai said on a recent trip to New York, speaking through an interpreter. “As I continued to make the plot, this idea of disaster kept creeping in. Suddenly, I felt surrounded in my daily life by disaster. It’s like a door that keeps opening.”
Shinkai has emerged as one of cinema’s most imaginative filmmakers of contemporary cataclysm. His movies aren’t just about surviving apocalypse, though, but living with its omnipresent threat. And it’s made him one of the biggest box-office draws in movies.
After it was released in 2016, Your Name became the then-best-selling anime of all time, dethroning Hayao Miyazaki’s beloved Spirited Away with nearly US$400 million in ticket sales. Weathering With You made nearly US$200 million. Before opening in North America, Suzume has already crossed US$200 million, including US$100 million in Japan and nearly that in China. It’s easily the biggest international release of the year so far in China, more than doubling the sales of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.
Much of that success is owed to Shinkai’s earnest grappling with today’s ecological upheaval in sprawling epics that are filtered through everyday life. National trauma mixes with supernatural fantasy. While Japan has been home to many extreme geological events, it’s a tension that most in the world can increasingly connect with.
“It can be anything: earthquakes, climate change, the pandemic. Russia and Ukraine, for an example,” says Shinkai. “This idea that our daily life will continue to maintain the status quo should be set aside and challenged.”
Shinkai, who writes and directs his films, has become convinced that young people shouldn’t be pandered to with stories where the natural world is heroically returned to balance, calling such approaches “egotistic and irresponsible.” Instead, his disasters take on metaphorical meaning for young protagonists who learn to persist, and find joy, in a world of perpetual danger, shadowed by loss.
His latest, which was the first anime in competition at the Berlin Film Festiva l in two decades, is a road movie where the 17-year-old Suzume (voiced by Nanoka Hara) travels from the the southwestern island of Kyushu with that mysterious young man, Souta (Hokuto Matsumura), who happens to get transformed into a three-legged chair while closing a portal.