Makoto Shinkai's Latest Movie


Makoto Shinkai,

The writer and director of Your Name has revealed his latest project. It’s called Suzume no Tojimari (Suzume Locking Up The Doors), and it will be released in Japan in fall 2022.

Above is the key art for the upcoming film.

Suzume no Tojimari follows a 17-year-old girl named Suzume who lives in a quiet town in Kyushu. Her life changes one day when a young traveler tells her he’s looking for a door. She follows the young man into the mountains, where there’s an old door surrounded by modern ruins. This begins her mysterious journey.

Shinkai is once again writing and directing the film. Masayoshi Tanaka, who previously collaborated with Shinkai on Your Name   and Weathering with You, will be designing the characters. Kenichi Tsuchiya is working as the picture’s animation director, and Takumi Tanji is the art director. Both previously worked on Your Name.

As of writing, no other staff members have yet been revealed, nor have any cast members been announced.

In the wake of Your Name’s massive success, Shinkai has become one of the anime world’s most celebrated directors and has been dubbed “the new Miyazaki.” While trying to break into the anime industry, Shinkai worked in gaming at Nihon Falcom, directing the opening movies for games, including Ys II Eternal.

Your Name was fantastic and is easily one of my favorite anime features of the decade. It was a tough, if not impossible, act to follow. And Weathering with You was a valiant, yet flawed, effort. In case you missed it, you can read my Weathering with You review right here . And for Your Name right here. Now that Shinkai isn’t coming fresh off the heels of Your Name, it’ll be interesting to see what he has in store for audiences with Suzume no Tojimari.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

From Up On Poppy Hills

Image
After first working as a landscape architect, Goro Miyazaki (son of legendary animated filmmaker Hayao) was lured into the family business as the inaugural director of the Studio Ghibli Museum in 2001. By 2006, he’d drifted into the director’s chair for the animated Ursula K Le Guin adaptation Tales From Earthsea. His second film, From Up On Poppy Hill, is a nostalgic melodrama set in early 1960s Yokohama adapted for the big screen by his father — a very different prospect to the Earthsea’s epic, dragon-filled fantasy. From Up On Poppy Hill is set in 1963, but you weren’t actually born until four years after that. How did you prepare for the design of the film? Luckily there is a lot of documentation on the way of life in what we call the Showa Period in Japan.  In fact, there was almost too much information! There are also many live action films and so on from the period which were a great help and I interviewed women who were high school students at the time. However, this peri...
Read more

Wolf Children

Image
Mamoru Hosoda is Japan’s next great anime director. It’s extremely refreshing to say that because I feel as though great anime is a rarity. I’m a long-time fan of Hayao Miyazaki, Isao Takahata, and Satoshi Kon, but their output is very low – and understandably so. Miyazaki’s unfortunate retirement, the odd once-a-decade Takahata release, and Kon’s death in 2010, etc. has me feeling rather starved for excellence in anime. So, Hosoda is a godsend. Frankly, I’m giddy at the thought that I have yet to see his first two films – The Girl Who Leapt through Time and Summer Wars. But for now, we’ll focus on his latest, a Studio Chizu and Madhouse production: Wolf Children. It’s the story of Hana, a university student when we meet her. She sits in a lecture hall, distracted by a thin, handsome man named Kare. Very soon, the audience is gently eased in to the loving relationship between these two. In fact, we are with Hana when Kare tells her that he is a wolf. (Not a werewolf that transforms onl...
Read more