Makoto Shinkai was never the same filmmaker after the 2011 earthquake struck Japan.
. Suzume, whose mother perished in the tsunami, years later meets a mysterious young man responsible for racing to close portals — literal doorways that appear around Japan — before they unleash a giant, earthquake-causing worm.
Shinkai has emerged as one of cinema’s most imaginative filmmakers of contemporary cataclysm. His movies aren’t just about surviving apocalypse, though, but living with its omnipresent threat. And it’s made him one of the biggest box-office draws in movies. Much of that success is owed to Shinkai’s earnest grappling with today’s ecological upheaval in sprawling epics that are filtered through everyday life. National trauma mixes with supernatural fantasy. While Japan has been home to many extreme geological events, it’s a tension that most in the world can increasingly connect with.
Shinkai, who writes and directs his films, has become convinced that young people shouldn’t be pandered to with stories where the natural world is heroically returned to balance, calling such approaches “egotistic and irresponsible.” Instead, his disasters take on metaphorical meaning for young protagonists who learn to persist, and find joy, in a world of perpetual danger, shadowed by loss.
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