Mako­to Shinkai: ​‘You can’t be Miyaza­ki, you can only be the sec­ond Miyazaki’

A bona fide box-office sen­sa­tion in Japan, crowd-pleas­ing ani­mé Your Name has bro­ken into the top 10 all-time the­atri­cal gross­es in its home coun­try, most notably scal­ing the heights only climbed pre­vi­ous­ly by the films of indus­try titan Hayao Miyazaki.

For years, it has been a sort of lazy jour­nal­is­tic short­hand to describe direc­tor Mako­to Shinkai (5 Cen­time­ters Per Sec­ond, Jour­ney to Agartha) as ​‘the new Miyaza­ki’; now his lat­est work has sur­passed the tak­ings of Ponyo and The Wind Ris­es, and looks set to match those of Princess Mononoke and Howl’s Mov­ing Castle.

While in the UK to present his genre-blend­ing, gen­der-swap­ping romance in com­pe­ti­tion at the BFI Lon­don Film Fes­ti­val, Shinkai spoke with LWLies about being end­less­ly com­pared to Miyaza­ki, craft­ing his own brand of emo­tion­al­ly charged ani­mé, and how the Japan­ese earth­quake of 2011 changed everything.

Shinkai: I want­ed to make a boy meets girl film, but I didn’t want the meet­ing to come at the begin­ning of the film, I want­ed it to come at the end. The focus of the audi­ence has to be on this boy and girl, and we want the audi­ence to love them. The sci-fi and fan­ta­sy ele­ments are there to strength­en those emotions.

My first influ­ences were Japan­ese con­tem­po­rary authors, includ­ing Haru­ki Muraka­mi, because they describe every­day life, and they accept life as it is. So I want­ed to do some­thing like that in ani­ma­tion. I’ve now been doing this for 10 years, so I think I’ve become more pro­fes­sion­al. Nowa­days, I don’t real­ly think in terms of influ­ences, I only think about my moti­va­tions, my emotions.

My moti­va­tion is dif­fer­ent from one movie to anoth­er. With Your Name, I’ve changed and soci­ety has changed, so my moti­va­tion is dif­fer­ent with this film. The rea­son for the change is the earth­quake in 2011. That real­ly changed my per­cep­tion of the world. There’s a line in the film – ​‘you nev­er know, Tokyo might go tomor­row’ – and I think every­one in Japan is aware of that. That can hap­pen, and it has hap­pened. You can lose that every­day, nor­mal life.

So I want­ed to cre­ate a sto­ry of recov­ery. You can’t change the past in real life, but you can change the past in a movie. Your Name has been com­pared to Shin Godzil­la, the new Godzil­la movie, because it’s about the Fukushi­ma nuclear plant. It’s been five years since the earth­quake, and I think many cre­ators final­ly know how to deal with the dis­as­ter, and we can now cre­ate movies, books, what­ev­er about it. It’s just tak­en us five years to be able to do that.

In the Japan­ese ani­ma­tion indus­try there’s a big ide­al, and that’s Hayao Miyaza­ki. He’s some­one you look up to and are influ­enced by. He’s got his own, total­ly orig­i­nal style. He’s a genius. But… you can’t be Miyaza­ki, you can only be the sec­ond Miyaza­ki, and that isn’t some­thing to aim for.

In Japan, peo­ple in the ani­ma­tion indus­try, or ani­mé fans, don’t real­ly use that term. But peo­ple who don’t nor­mal­ly see ani­mat­ed films – includ­ing the media – tend to use it. It’s inevitable, because Miyaza­ki is so famous.

And he’s a huge influ­ence. He and his team basi­cal­ly estab­lished the whole sys­tem. They cre­at­ed what Japan­ese ani­mé is now. It’s impos­si­ble not to be influ­enced by him. I saw Lapu­ta [Cas­tle In The Sky] when I was in Junior High School. That was the first movie I went to see with my pock­et mon­ey, that I paid for myself – and it was great. There was noth­ing like it. It’s not like I want to make movies like his movies, but I want to achieve what he achieved emo­tion­al­ly for lots of peo­ple, includ­ing myself.

I agree, he’s like a father, a teacher, a head­mas­ter… He talks about ethics, and he’s got this idea about how peo­ple should live, or what they should live by. He’s an author­i­tar­i­an fig­ure, if you like. I don’t know if that’s a gen­er­a­tion thing or a per­son­al thing, but I can’t tell teenagers what they should do, or how to live their lives. Because I remem­ber those emo­tions I had when I was a teenag­er – I remem­ber fail­ure, I remem­ber how great it was to talk with a girl I had a crush on – and I still have them. So our mes­sages are very different.

Your Name is released in the UK 18 November.