Makoto Shinkai - The voice of a distant star

Written by A. H. on 05 Mar 2010

While some great creators and directors become well known largely on account of the sheer quantity and prolific nature of their work, others can equally gain critical acclaim aplenty simply on account of creating sporadic yet fantastic pieces of work - An example of "quality over quantity" writ large.  In the realms of modern anime, one director who could almost be seen as the poster boy for this adage is Makoto Shinkai, a director with only three full animated projects to his name yet a man who is much feted as a master of his craft, to the point where he has even had a day dedicated to him by his doting fans.  Indeed, it's as a part of the second ever "Global Shinkai Day" that we're penning this article to celebrate the joys of his work to date.

Makoto Shinkai was actually born as Makoto Niitsu, on February 9th 1973 in Japan's Nagano prefecture.  His love for both the animated medium and story-telling appear to have grown while he was at middle school, a time which exposed him to large amounts of anime and manga as well as novels.  This love of literature in particular seemed to influence his early career choices, as he moved to Tokyo in 1992 to study Japanese literature at Chuo University.  While there, he took part in the establishment's juvenile literature club, drawing picture books to keep his creative juices flowing.

Upon graduation from university in 1994, Shinkai managed to find a job working for video game developer Falcom - Employment which took up five years of his career as he spent his time learning to use and manipulate computer graphics while working on video and graphical content for games, web sites and the like.  While this work was at least a creative outlet for Makoto Shinkai's obvious talents, it simply wasn't enough - He yearned for longer and more complex projects to showcase his ideas and abilities rather than the short clips he was being paid to produce at present.

She and Her Cat

It was this desire for more control over the story-telling process that led Shinkai to start working on projects of his own for the first time starting in 1997, and after a few brief studies his first true result was the five-minute monochrome short animation Kanojo to Kanojo no Neko (or She and Her Cat in English), which saw the light of day in 1999.

This five minute animated tale depicts the relationship between a male cat and his female owner, but told entirely from the perspective of the cat himself.  Aside from the soundtrack and the owner's voice acting, this effort (including the voice of Chobi the cat) was created entirely by Shinkai himself, and the result was an astonishing success with the short film winning several awards, most notably the DoGA CG Animation contest in the year 2000.  Ironically, while many critics praised the use of black and white in She and Her Cat, the truth behind its use was far more mundane than artistic - Shinkai had chosen to work in monochrome simply because it was less time-consuming, an important consideration as he was still juggling the project with his "real" job at that point in time.  That aside, this early effort already put in place some of the concepts and ideas which would permeate all of Shinkai's later works.

This success wasn't likely to make Shinkai rest on his laurels however - Indeed, he was already beginning to plan and muse over his next project...