Shinkai Makoto makes one kind of film, and he makes it better than anybody else in the history of the medium: teen love story; major scenes take place against dramatic sunsets; sunlight glimmers off of pools of water; there’s rain; there are trains; in its last fifth, the story transforms from a smooth execution of […]

Rain, trains, sunlight peeking through the rain, a disaster of an ending: I do not know if 2013’s The Garden of Word has the most Shinkai Makoto of any film, but at just 46 minutes long, I do know that it has the highest density of Shinkai Makoto of any film. In a sense, it’s […]

A shorter version of this review appeared at the Film Experience The bulk of the American reception of Weathering with You, the newest film from animation director Shinkai Makoto, has centered on the question of whether or not it lives up to the standard set by his last and by far most successful film, 2016’s […]

I’ll say this about Your Name.: as much as I love it (and I do, a lot), I really cannot begin to understand why this was the film struck such a huge chord, becoming the fourth-highest-grossing film in the history of the Japanese box office (the second-highest Japanese production on that list) and the highest-grossing […]