Tag: Makoto Shinkai

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Suzume
(Suzume
No Tojimari,
すずめの戸締まり,
lit. Suzume’s
Locking Up)

Director – Makoto Shinkai – 2022 – Japan – Cert. PG – 122m

***1/2

Aided by a man turned into a mobile, talking, three-legged chair, a schoolgirl must prevent giant, freak weather ‘worms’ from devastating Japan with earthquakes – anime feature is out in UK and Irish cinemas on Friday, April 14th

Prompted by a question from a man she meets on a road in her hometown, 17-year-old schoolgirl Suzume visits an abandoned hot springs facility in which is situated a door in a free standing door frame. She opens it only to find she can’t enter. Shortly after this, in school, she notices smoke in a gigantic, red and black worm-like form rising from the hot springs facility.

At the same time, everyone around her receives earthquake warnings on their smartphones, but no-one else can see the rising form. She goes back to the facility to find the man she met trying to close the door and cut off the incoming smoke, something she helps him to do. They do not close the door in time to prevent the red and black form falling onto the land and an earthquake resulting. The man locks the door using a key on his person.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Weathering With You
(Tenki No Ko,
天気の子,
lit. Child Of Weather)

Director – Makoto Shinkai – 2019 – Japan – Cert. 12a – 112m

***1/2

A runaway teenage boy in a constantly raining Tokyo falls for a girl who can replace rain with sunshine – Makoto Shinkai’s feature returns to cinemas for one day only on Wednesday, April 5th, ahead of the release of Shinkai’s new film Suzume on April 14th

A bravura opening shot pulls from rainswept Tokyo in through a hospital window to a girl waiting by a patient’s bedside, recalling nothing so much as the heroine of everyone’s favourite anime identity thriller Perfect Blue (Satoshi Kon, 1997) reflected against a train carriage window with a Tokyo cityscape visible beyond, but where Kon uses such imagery as an entry point to multilayered realities, Weathering With You’s vision never really extends beyond trying to recreate and repeat the formula that rendered its director’s previous Your Name (Makoto Shinkai, 2016) such a runaway success.

Like Your Name, Weathering With You centres on a teenage boy / girl romance but instead of the gender body swap and time travel devices in the earlier film – which probably shouldn’t have worked but somehow did – Weathering has an equally flimsy plot device about a girl named Hina who possesses the ability to turn rain into sunshine.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Your Name
(Kimi No Na Wa,
君の名は)

Director – Makoto Shinkai – 2016 – Japan – Cert. 12 – 106m

*****

Do you know what it feels like for a girl? Urban teenage boy and countryside girl repeatedly swap bodies overnight, as fate draws them together through a meteor strike – Makoto Shinkai’s breakout animation returns to cinemas for one day only on Wednesday, March 29th, ahead of the release of Shinkai’s new film Suzume on April 14th

In a spectacular and bravura single take, vertical panning shot, a meteor descends from the heavens through the clouds towards the small lakeside town of Itomori. Then, another time, another place: on a train in Tokyo a teenage girl spots a boy and their eyes meet but there’s no time to exchange names. She knows him but he has no idea who she is. As she gets off the train, he asks her… “Your Name?”

Thereafter, Tokyo boy Taki wakes up some days Mitsuha’s body, and the other way round… [Read the rest at DMovies.org]

Your Name returns to cinemas for one day only on Wednesday, March 29th, ahead of Shinkai’s Suzume on April 14th.

Originally reviewed for UK 2017 IMAX release.

Trailer (Blu-ray release):