Makoto Shinkai Comes to China to Talk About the Story Behind Your Name.

"I don't think I'm necessarily the next Hayao Miyazaki... but what I emphasize in my work is the emotions of teenage boys and girls."

Your Name. opens in Chinese theaters on December 2.

This year has already become the year of collecting the full set of Japanese animated features: Chibi Maruko-chan, Naruto, Saint Seiya, Dragon Ball Z and Crayon Shin-chan have all reached Chinese cinemas one after another.

But for anime fans, Your Name. still means something more. It is without question one of the most successful Japanese animated films of recent years — arguably of all time. After 13 weeks in theaters, it had taken 18.97 billion yen at the Japanese box office, making it the seventh-highest-grossing film in Japanese box-office history. The three Japanese films above it on that list are all Hayao Miyazaki classics: Princess Mononoke (19.3 billion yen), Howl's Moving Castle (19.6 billion yen) and Spirited Away (30.4 billion yen).

That has made Makoto Shinkai, after Mamoru Hosoda (The Boy and the Beast, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time), the most promising "heir to Miyazaki."

Shinkai himself says he differs from Miyazaki in some ways — he means a different way of working, and also the narrower audience he used to reach.

Shinkai was born in 1973 into a family of builders; his father is president of Niitsu-gumi, the family construction firm founded in 1909. After university he worked at the Japanese game company Falcom, then entered animation by making short films on his own. Before Your Name., his best-known works were 5 Centimeters per Second, The Garden of Words, The Place Promised in Our Early Days and Voices of a Distant Star — shorts and features all built around young love.

In 2016, Your Name. gave Shinkai his first real breakout with a mass audience. His signature strength is the sheer beauty of his images, and Your Name. has the same quality, where every frame could be a wallpaper. At the same time, he broke with the storytelling that used to draw complaints: simple plots, hypersensitive emotion, a melancholy mood.

This time Shinkai wrote a bright but eventful fantasy love story. One day Taki Tachibana, a high school student in Tokyo, wakes up in an old town deep in the mountains, inside a girl's body. He finds that the girl has taken his place in Tokyo at the same time. He learns her name: Mitsuha Miyamizu.

Your Name. took two years to make. Shinkai wrote the script and did the storyboards and color design himself. Masayoshi Tanaka, the character designer on Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day, handled character design; Masashi Ando, animation director on Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke, was animation director; and Genki Kawamura, producer of Wolf Children and Attack on Titan, produced.

In an interview with the Japanese newspaper Mainichi Shimbun, Shinkai said of Your Name.: "In some ways this is the work in my career that has come out closest to what I wanted."

He said: "Ever since I made Voices of a Distant Star, I've made animation to satisfy my own urge to create, of course, but also because I wanted other people to see my work. From having friends I know be moved by my animation to having audiences I've never met be moved by it, the original impulse — to convey a feeling to someone — has never changed. After every film I ask myself what I failed to convey the way I imagined it, and what I failed to convey the way I expected. Take 5 Centimeters per Second: some viewers found it healing, others felt hurt by it and said they'd never watch it again. People also called it a depressing piece of animation. Feeling something strong from a work is actually a good thing; what I want to convey to the audience is an optimistic, forward-looking attitude. For 14 years I've kept working by trial and error. On Children Who Chase Lost Voices and on The Garden of Words, I listened every week during production to what the people around me thought of the script. This time, on Your Name., I followed through completely on the notes of producer Genki Kawamura, who has a very strong sense of direction."

Your Name. was brought into China by Coloroom Pictures, Enlight Media's animation arm. With the Chinese release, Shinkai also came to Beijing for the first time to promote the film.

In the first three quarters of this year, thanks to The Mermaid, Big Fish & Begonia and I Belonged to You, Enlight's films took 5.098 billion yuan at the box office, and the company booked revenue of 878 million yuan, putting it within reach of its 6 billion yuan box-office target for the year. Its fourth-quarter releases include Hide and Seek, Bad Guys, Buddies in India and Your Name. In fact,

Your Name. is the one among them most likely to interest young viewers.

But with more than a week to go before release, Enlight badly needs Chinese moviegoers outside the anime fandom to learn who Shinkai is and what Your Name. is. It teamed up with the photo app Shiguang Album to launch a "Shinkai filter" — you may already have seen people showing off their anime-style portraits on WeChat Moments. The app's popularity may give the film's box office some help.

On November 21, Shinkai attended the film's premiere. On the 22nd he went to the Communication University of China for a session with students from the animation department.

He took questions from students and the press, and talked about animation, work and life.

The following is the on-site Q&A

(Q: audience question, X: Makoto Shinkai)

Q: I'm from the Class of 2014 animation program. We love this film — my classmates and I went to Hong Kong to watch Your Name. I'd like to know how your life changed after you left school and went out into the world, compared with your college years.

X: I don't know what it's like in China, but in Japan a lot of students are afraid of going out into the world; they all feel it's better to stay in school. For me, life only became truly enjoyable after I left school, because I found work worth pouring my energy into, and that work is making animation.

So I think your college life is probably very happy right now, but once you start working you'll definitely be happier still. Please enjoy your lives.

Q: What did you go through, and think about, to be able to draw light this well? Second question: how do you draw the light and shadow of scenes or objects you've never seen — a meteor falling, say, or other things that don't exist in reality?

X: After I graduated I joined a game company first, where I worked on a fantasy RPG. The game was interesting, but it depicted an unreal world of swords and magic, while real life is full of packed commuter trains. My urge to draw the reality of my own life kept growing, so I left that game company. I felt that if I could find beautiful things in the world right around me, my own life would get happier and easier. That's why I drew traffic lights so beautifully in my work, and I've held on to that feeling ever since.

I don't draw all of that animation myself, either. Much of it is handed to the production staff, and much of what comes back is what they thought up. So, as you probably know very well, making animation is collective work; there's no need for one person to do it all.

I can tell that the two students who asked really like me, but this doesn't have much to do with animation technique. I enjoyed hearing it, but I know there are a lot of animation majors here, and I had expected more detailed, more technical questions.

Q: I want to ask about the script. I've seen 5 Centimeters per Second, where you used to treat feelings very seriously and very delicately. This time you added some comic touches — the male lead becomes quite cute, and there's the charming bit where a girl slips the female lead a love letter. How did you think about putting that kind of thing in?

X: When I made 5 Centimeters per Second, around 2007 and 2008, Japanese society was very stable. In a stable society people wonder whether an unchanging daily life will simply go on forever, and because there was so little upheaval, I wanted to look for deep feeling inside tiny ripples.

But after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, many Japanese people's thinking changed, because they understood that neither their lives nor the cities they lived in would stay the same. Most Japanese felt a sense of crisis: the place you live could be gone tomorrow, you yourself could be gone. Under that feeling, I asked myself what kind of work Japanese people needed at that moment. So I chose Your Name. I think writing an animated screenplay means thinking at the same time about society, about what the audience needs, and about what you yourself want to express — you have to find a balance between them. If you write scripts, you should be able to understand this too. Good luck!

Q: Hello, I'm an animation student. We're working on our graduation projects now, and I'm very curious about time management. How do you plan your schedule while making a film, and what does your day look like?

X: Your Name. took me two years. From the start I set one goal: never pull an all-nighter. That's nothing remarkable in itself. Ideally a shot takes two hours; in reality you spend a year, two years, ten years on a project, and along the way your sense of time gradually goes out of joint. In my films each shot runs about four seconds on average, and it can take several weeks to finish. So I think the most important thing is this: you might spend two weeks drawing a four-second shot, but you have to keep reminding yourself that what you're drawing is four seconds long. Keep that in mind. As for the scheduling you asked about, it depends on your own rhythm. If you can concentrate for 8 hours a day, draw for 8 hours; if you can only concentrate for 4, draw for 4. Finding the rhythm of concentration that suits you is extremely important.

Q: Your scenes are very detailed and many are based on real places, but the finished animation still changes them. How do you decide what to keep from a real location and what to change?

X: Shots differ in length — some two seconds, some ten — and how much location scouting they get depends on that. I think the point of animation isn't to reproduce reality the way a photograph does, so sometimes I make very bold changes. When scouting, the position of the sun is actually very important, but I've always felt that when you're drawing a sunset, the light may well come from an angle that's physically impossible, and I think that's fine. Even if you put in two or three suns, several light sources, as long as it produces the right feeling it's fine.

So when you draw a shot you can't just put your head down and draw. First, think about how many seconds it actually runs; second, what it means within the script as a whole, within the story. You have to keep thinking about that. Good luck to you too!

Q: Your way of drawing is very different from the traditional Japanese approach — you combine photographs with CG. Could that become the leading approach in Japanese animated film production in the future?

X: You mean using photographs to build the composition? In fact only a small part of the composition uses photographs; the great majority is drawn by hand first. There are also cases, like the shrine in the film, where I build the whole set in 3D, then place camera positions inside it and compose the shot from what those cameras see. The process probably isn't all that different in China. What matters is how you keep the quality very even and very consistent, whether you're working from photographs or from hand-drawn references.

Q: Have you thought about working with Chinese companies in the future?

X: If there's a chance to work with China, I'm personally very interested. I do worry about how the two sides would actually communicate — whether I'd need to study English properly. I look forward to it!

Q: Have you seen any Chinese animation — A Chinese Ghost Story, directed by Tsui Hark in 1997, or more recent films like Monkey King: Hero Is Back and Big Fish & Begonia? Many of our graduate students now go to Japan to study animation, since Japanese animation is more advanced. How do you see China's animation industry developing?

X: I haven't done my homework. I haven't watched much Chinese animation, and honestly I haven't watched much Japanese animation either. Yesterday I talked with the directors of both Big Fish & Begonia and Monkey King: Hero Is Back, and now I really want to see their films — once I'm back in Japan I'll find a way to watch them. But from the glimpse I got of the two trailers, I don't think Japanese technology is far ahead of China's. In software and in technique, I think the two are basically at the same level. So the real question is what creators should be doing within Chinese and Japanese society respectively. That's how I see it.

Q: I wanted to ask about the beautiful rotating wide shots in the trailer. Are those hand-drawn in the film, or is 3D technology involved?

X: Just as you say. For those rotating scenes the set is built in CG first, with a few simple figures and models placed in it. Once the images are captured frame by frame, the people are drawn in by hand over the models. Shots like that look very impressive, but they're brutal for the animators, so they can't be used everywhere — only for the few most important shots.

Q: About your next film, you've said you want to aim at teenagers, as your previous work has — why? You said you want to reach lonely teenagers, which made me think of A Silent Voice (the feature Kyoto Animation adapted from Yoshitoki Oima's manga of the same name, directed by Naoko Yamada, which you've praised). That deals with the same subject. What do you think of work like that?

X: Your Name. has been a huge hit this time, and a lot of people are asking whether I'm the next Miyazaki. I don't think I'm necessarily the next Miyazaki. Director Miyazaki's films can be enjoyed by anyone from kindergarteners to adults, but what I emphasize in my work is the emotions of teenage boys and girls. I think animation is something you watch while you're growing up, while you're becoming an adult. It really only needs to exist for one stretch of a person's life, rather than being the same kind of work you keep watching twenty or thirty years later. In that sense A Silent Voice is also a work about the pain in the hearts of teenagers going through adolescence. I had drinks with Yamada, its director, not long ago — she's a great beauty. That's all.

Q: In Your Name., every meeting feels like a reunion after a long parting. Do you believe in fate yourself?

X: People often ask me whether I believe in fate. I don't really, because what we call reality is countless coincidences piled on top of one another, which is how we came to be standing where we are now. But when we try to make sense of reality, of this world, we do it by telling a story — we build one in our own minds. So what people call fate is really the story a person tells when they explain their own life; that story is their fate. That's probably why, with the people closest to us — your wife, the people who matter to you — everyone's story feels to them like their own fate.

The person you like doesn't necessarily like you back. People's feelings are never perfectly matched, and that's exactly what makes a story interesting.

Images from the film's official Weibo and Douban Movie