Disaster Cinema: The shock of the 2011 earthquake can still be felt in the storytelling of the anime Makoto Shinkai

When a tsunami and earthquake swept through the Tohoku region in northern Japan and triggered a nuclear meltdown, Shinkai, the 50-year-old director and animator of some of the world’s most popular animated features, felt his sense of storytelling crumble.

“The shock I felt was that the daily life we ​​were used to in Japan could suddenly be interrupted without any warning whatsoever,” says Shinkai. “I had this strange, foreboding feeling that this could happen again and again. I started thinking about how I wanted to tell stories within this new reality.”

The three films that Shinkai followed—”Your Name,” “Weathering With You,” and the remake, “Suzume”—each connected the big emotional tales of an environmental disaster. In “Your Name”, a meteor threatens to demolish a village, an event that overlaps with a body-switching romance. In “Weathering With You,” a teenage boy on the run befriends a girl from Tokyo who can control the weather, causing fluctuations that reverse climate change.

“Suzume,” which opens in US theaters April 11, harkens back to the 2011 earthquake. Years later, Suzume, whose mother perished in a tsunami, meets a mysterious young man responsible for the race to close the Gates—actual doorways that appear all over Japan— before they unleash a giant earthquake-causing worm.

“With these three films, I didn’t plan to do a disaster movie. I wanted to tell a love story, a love story, a teenage girl in puberty,” Shinkai said on his recent trip to New York, speaking through a translator. “As I continued to plot, the idea persisted. This catastrophe is infiltrating. Suddenly, I felt surrounded in my daily life by disaster. It’s like a door that keeps opening.”

Shinkai has emerged as one of the most innovative contemporary disaster filmmakers. His films are not just about surviving the apocalypse, but about living with its omnipresent threat. And it made it one of the biggest box office hits in movies.

After its release in 2016, “Your Name” became the best-selling anime at the time, displacing Hayao Miyazaki’s beloved “Spirited Away” with nearly $400 million in ticket sales. “Weathering With You” grossed nearly $200 million. Before opening in North America, “Suzume” had already crossed $200 million, including $100 million in Japan and nearly that in China. It’s easily the biggest international release of the year so far in China, doubling the sales of “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.”

Much of this success is due to Shinkai’s earnest grappling with current environmental turmoil in sprawling epics filtered through everyday life. Patriotic trauma mixes with supernatural fiction. While Japan has been home to many extreme geological events, it is a tension that most people in the world can increasingly relate to.

It could be anything: earthquakes, climate change, a pandemic. Russia and Ukraine, for example,” says Shinkai. “This idea that our daily lives will continue to maintain the status quo needs to be pushed aside and challenged.”

Shinkai, who writes and directs his films, has become convinced that young people should not be satisfied with stories in which the natural world heroically returns to balance, calling such methods “selfish and irresponsible”. Instead, his disasters take on an allegorical meaning of young heroes learning to persevere, to find joy, in a world of perpetual danger, overshadowed by loss.

His latest film, which was the first anime in competition at the Berlin Film Festival in two decades, is a road movie in which 17-year-old Suzumi (voiced by Nanoka Hara) travels from the southwestern island of Kyushu with that mysterious young man, Souta (Hokuto Matsumura), who transforms into a three-legged chair while closing the gate.

As a wooden assistant, Miyazaki’s side character Souta is remembered as the jumping scarecrow in “Howl’s Moving Castle”. But Shinkai, who is often cited as a Miyazaki heir, says his film is not being honored. But it gives Miyazaki influence so pervasive in Japanese society that it permeates everything. He imagines Suzume herself originating in his films.

Shinkai loved the symbolism of the chair, something we use every day. His father made him one when he was a kid. While promoting “Suzume”, Shinkai traveled with a chair like the one in the movie, packed it in a bag, brought it with him on stage and sometimes took pictures of it in places like Times Square or the Museum of Natural History.

“I chose very everyday things—a door and a chair—that would probably be relevant to a wide range of audiences,” he says. “This door symbolism, I think people are able to translate into their own story. We start to think about: How do we maintain our daily routine?”

Shinkai is known for photorealistic panoramas of shimmering splendor. As much as the entrances are Suzume’s icons, the most indelible are the ones he uses at the beginning and end of the film. Suzumi rides her bike up a steep hill with a shimmering ocean behind her. The waters below, which could indicate a tsunami that left you orphaned, are at once fascinating and perilous.

“In a strange way, I feel that with ‘your name’ and ‘weathering with you’ and ‘Suzume’ I am creating this kind of folklore or legend,” says Shinkai. “In myths or these ancient legends, what they do is take real-life events and turn them into a story that can be passed on to others.”

It is not known if Shinkai will continue this endeavor in his next film. He says it’s a blank canvas. But he does not close the door.

“As I continue to produce more stories,” he says, grinning, “this door may start creaking open again.”

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