Array
Makoto Shinkai doesn’t yet know the story he will tell in his next film, only that it will be about what he knows best.
For one, it will be set in Japan, filled with those breathtakingly gorgeous landscapes he draws on his animation storyboards.
If he were to set his film outside Japan, he would have to live in that city for at least several months.
The narrative will almost certainly star a young hero or heroine, or both, with hearts of gold, who fearlessly embark on their coming-of-age journeys.
All his recent films have those characteristics. It’s all he knows, Shinkai says, with a humble laugh.
“I am not the kind of person with varied interests or many skills. I can only do one thing. I can only make my animation,” he told The Associated Press in a recent online interview from Los Angeles.
He can’t even think of filmmakers or animators who have influenced him, except for being profoundly affected by Hayao Miyazaki’s “My Neighbor Totoro,’’ when he saw it as a youngster.
In his latest work, “Suzume,” set for release in North America on Friday, the heroine literally closes the door on a disaster.
It references a real-life disaster, the 2011 tsunami, quake and nuclear catastrophe in northeastern Japan, which killed thousands, left swaths of coastline covered in mud and debris, and contaminated homes and farmland with radiation near a damaged nuclear power plant.
Shinkai’s last two works focused on imaginary disasters.
In his 2016 work “Your Name,” which juxtaposes a love story and gender identity switch, a comet smashes into earth.
His 2019 film, “Weathering With You,” focuses on the friendship between a boy who has run away from home and a mysterious girl who can control the weather; it features the city of Tokyo getting flooded.
