![]() ![]() ![]() In short, the greatest animation team you could realistically hope for, and then some. While he was no longer an employee at the studio when Ghibli announced that they were suspending activities in 2014, having someone of Ando’s pedigree as the animation centerpiece of his project with such good timing led to Your Name becoming the poster child of the post-Ghibli movement in the industry-a sudden influx of exceptionally talented animators who suddenly had to find new roles, which in this case led the participation of Takeshi Inamura, Atsuko Tanaka, Megumi Kagawa, Shunsuke Hirota, Hiroko Minowa, and so on.Īs it usually happens when you gather this much animation talent, gravity kicked in to attract even more outstanding names: a Production IG faction led by Kazuchika Kise and featuring some of the studio’s realistic animation experts like Shinji Suetomi and Takahiro Chiba, as well as a legion of theatrical level freelance aces including the likes of Hiroyuki Okiura, Hideki Hamasu, Akira Honma, Ei Inoue, Norio Matsumoto, and of course Takashi Hashimoto to animate everything and anything related to the comet in the film. Leading that spectacular production was animation character designer and lead animation director Masashi Ando, whom you might know as a key player in 90s to early 00s Ghibli, or perhaps as an equally important figure in his tour across all projects by Japanese animation titans that he’s been on since then. In the span of a single project, he went from requiring the world itself to act in place of the cast to directing the best character animators in the business. And, most importantly, those had life breathed into them by an animation team of an incomparable caliber to anything Shinkai previously had at his disposal. Although it would start the amusing trend of becoming the face of Shinkai’s modern work and then being unable to actually work on his films, Masayoshi Tanaka helped by lending his attractive character designs. This upgrade wasn’t so obvious in the dazzling backgrounds and compositing, as those were already top of the line, but by all means made a difference when it comes to the animation. ![]() ![]() While you can’t seriously argue that his works have rich narratives, his drive to send positive messages to younger generations growing up to inherit a future that seems not to have much of a future is the real deal, and only seems to have increased tenfold now that TOHO has given a much larger platform than he ever had.Īs someone who began his career as a bit of a one-man army that lived and died through its aesthetic, it’s no surprise that Shinkai made sure the movie’s visuals underwent a similar glow-up and refinement, doing away with any extraneous elements and emphasizing its laser-focused imagery. It’s easy to look back on it as an excellent effort in storytelling more than in having a story to tell, but the more Shinkai’s career progresses, the more I feel like such backhanded praise doesn’t do him justice. With these circumstances in mind, the approach Shinkai and planning producer Genki Kawamura took since the very start makes a lot of sense: a bright, vibrant streamlining of Shinkai’s traditional star-crossed lovers narrative that perfectly read a room craving such a story in a post-Tohoku earthquake-and midst-demoralizing nonsense on a worldwide level-audience, smartly constructed as a piece of entertainment that encourages multiple watches through its structure and easy digestibility. Not even TOHO’s business-savvy producers could bring themselves to predict the industry-shifting hit they were about to unleash. At the time, it had heavier responsibilities on its shoulders than any prior work of his, including its 1.5 billion JPY box office target a meager-looking figure now that we know it was multiple orders of magnitude more popular, but that at the time represented 10 times his highest-grossing work. This is how they affected Your Name, Weathering with You, and even his new film Suzume no Tojimari.Īlthough his tremendous commercial success as of late and his prominence in anime fandom consciousness even prior to that make it easy to forget, Your Name was actually Makoto Shinkai’s very first widely distributed feature film, and thus an entirely different challenge for him. Makoto Shinkai’s modern work is defined by its immediate circumstances to a larger degree than most people realize, be it the themes he decides to tackle or the finesse in the delivery that depends on the whims of the industry. ![]()
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