weathering with you your name garden of words

The Garden of Words likes to keep you guessing. (We intentionally omit his films shorter than 25 minutes from consideration while delightful, it wouldn’t really be fair to weigh them against his features.) One thing seemed clear as we watched each film back to back: For the most part, Shinkai’s films are getting better and better with each new release. We’ve ranked his major releases below, from the early 2000s sci-fi efforts, like Voices of a Distant Star, to the magical-realist fantasies he’s best known for today, like Your Name and Suzume. With the release of Suzume, his first since 2019’s Weathering With You, it’s the perfect time to familiarize yourself with all of Shinkai’s animated films. Shinkai’s best movies animate his characters in shimmering, richly detailed situations that externalize their thoughts, whether it means putting a depressed boy stuck on an inert train in Five Centimeters per Second or using a symbolic red string to tether the two leads of Your Name to each other.

For him, though, it’s an essential part of creating his visually stunning movies - which are known for their vibrant, photographically referenced art and highly charged emotionality. “When I would scream or shout like this, my 12-year-old daughter would knock on my door and ask, ‘Dad, is everything okay?’ My neighbors would almost call the police,” he joked. As he recently explained to an audience at New York City’s Museum of the Moving Image, he’ll draw every scene, then record a fully acted out, emotional audio scratch track performance for every single character in the two-hour film. For his latest film, Suzume, out in theaters this week, he spent 15 months completing the video storyboards. After two decades of making anime features, he is always credited as his films’ director, writer, and storyboard artist, and - on his earliest shorts - he sometimes performed as a voice actor. Makoto Shinkai is known for doing it all.

Weathering with you your name garden of words