As of the start of 2025, fifteen of the twenty most successful films ever released in Japanese cinemas are animated films, and nearly all are domestic Japanese films.
Unsurprisingly, the director most prominent in the list is Miyazaki Hayao. As the creator of beloved animated fantasies such as Spirited Away, Miyazaki is a decades-old favourite in Japan, with four films in the top twenty. But there’s another animation director just behind him, with three films in the list. He’s Shinkai Makoto, and he’s unquestionably one of the most popular directors in Japan today.
Shinkai began making short animated films in the late 1990s, and was directing features by the mid-2000s. A decade on, he made his breakout film, Your Name in 2016. For many viewers, both in Japan and abroad, Your Name is where Shinkai ’begins,’ the film which defines his popular image. It’s certainly an excellent starting point if you’re new to Shinkai’s work, although any of his titles described in this article could serve as an introduction.
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Your Name
Your Name lures the viewer. Its first half masquerades as a simple fantasy comedy: in modern Japan, a teenage boy in Tokyo and a girl in the countryside start waking up in each other’s bodies and homes. They don’t know each other; they’ve seemingly never met. They swap back and forth helplessly, their lives and identities criss-crossing, leaving angry messages for each other as they struggle with their situation.
Outside Japan, the obvious comparison is America’s Freaky Friday, where a mother and daughter swap bodies. Your Name, though, focuses on teenage experience, as do most of Shinkai’s films. The film is easily taken as an allegory for the trials of puberty.
But midway through its story, Your Name has a shocking, rug-pulling twist. The film transforms into an adventure story about desperate searches, impossible hopes and two youngsters driven by their existential ache to connect, to be together, as the film repeatedly tears them apart.
On top of that, Your Name makes a clear (though implicit) reference to the trauma of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in northern Japan, which killed more than twenty thousand people in 2011. Moreover, Shinkai has the audacity to do this in the context of a populist, exciting, overwhelmingly crowd-pleasing adventure film.
Your Name showcases Shinkai’s brand of beautified realism, in which the city and country settings are rendered in convincing detail, yet with colours that shine, especially in the sky. The editing is often dizzyingly fast, with half-glimpsed shots, yet the story’s clarity is never sacrificed to style.
The action is punctuated by pop numbers from the band Radwimps, which has collaborated with Shinkai on all his subsequent films. In particular, Your Name is motored along by Radwimps’ frantically rocketing number, “Zen Zen Zense” – the name roughly means, “Past Past Past Life.”
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Weathering With You
All of Shinkai’s films have separate stories. However, Weathering With You, released three years after Your Name in 2019, feels close to its predecessor. Set in a Tokyo beset with endless rain, it follows another teenage girl and boy, each of them runaways for different reasons.
After they meet in bizarre circumstances (a gun is involved), the boy learns the girl is a “Weather Maiden,” who brings sunshine through her prayers. The film swings into light comedy as the couple start up an impromptu business to capitalise on her power. But as in Your Name, fate falls from the heavens.
Weathering With You converges with Your Name in its last act, with dazzlingly animated chase scenes and other excitements. Yet its provocative ending feels like a deliberate challenge to any viewers expecting a straightforwardly crowd-pleasing film. In one interview, Shinkai said he wanted to say that young people are not responsible for the state of the world they’re born into. In Shinkai’s words, he wanted to show those youngsters “getting on with their lives, laughing and loving.”
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5 Centimeters per Second and Children Who Chase Lost Voices
Shinkai’s earlier features, before Your Name, are less spectacular but they share the same aesthetics. (Much the same is true of the earlier and later films by Miyazaki Hayao.) The biggest difference is tonal; Shinkai’s earlier films have much less humour. Anticipating Your Name, 5 Centimeters per Second (2007) is driven by a yearning for connection. But instead of teenage comedy, it has grandiloquent images of loneliness: a train lost in a snowstorm, a rocket heading endlessly into space.
Children Who Chase Lost Voices (2011) is Shinkai’s closest film to a Miyazaki fantasy. Unusually, the film has a preteen girl as the protagonist. However, her adventure is still romantically tinged, as her search for a lost boy leads her underground to a fantasy world. Two of the film’s settings – a deep cave and a vast crater – turn up in more modest, mysterious and arguably more effective ways in Your Name. And the film’s climax foreshadows the end of Weathering With You, when we see the shocking things a character will do to save the person that he loves.
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The Garden of Words
The Garden of Words (2013) is the best of Shinkai’s early films, and some viewers may even prefer it to his later ones. Running only 46 minutes, Garden involves a teenage boy and a young adult woman who meet repeatedly in a park during Japan’s rainy season, which spans June and July. The park is real, the exquisite Shinjuku Gyo-en National Park. It’s an oasis in Tokyo’s dense city centre, and lovingly rendered by Shinkai in the animation.
The film’s subject is provocative, given the characters’ age-gap and a mischievously suggestive focus on feet – the boy is an aspiring shoemaker. Yet this is an intensely sensitive study of lonely people, and also a slowly revealed story of two sides, with its own cunning twist in the tale.
Andrew Osmond is a journalist and author specialising in animation. His books include 100 Animated Feature Films and the BFI Film Classics book on Spirited Away.
Beauty and Melancholy: Shinkai Makoto Film Season
Find out more about this film season at Japan House London (9 February – 12 June 2025)