Makoto Shinkai, who did not grow up

In 2016, when Shinkai Makoto first came to Beijing to promote publicity, he said: "I didn't expect that I had so many fans in China. That year, the movie he came to promote was "Your Name." 》。

This movie made Makoto Shinkai's name go from inside the two-dimensional circle to outside the circle in one fell swoop - "Your Name." " received 575 million box office in China, and Douban has more than 1.36 million people with a high score of 8.5.

Seven years later, he came to China again with his new film "Journey to the Bell Bud", and before the movie was released, he became popular on domestic social platforms because of sharing working meals.

"Journey to the Bell Buds" is the final chapter of Makoto Shinkai's "disaster trilogy", and the total box office of the film's point screening and pre-sale exceeded 100 million the day before the screening. After its release on March 25, Lighthouse Professional Edition data showed that the box office of "Journey to Lingbud" reached 94.542 million yuan on the first day, breaking through "Your Name." , became the premiere-day box office champion of a domestic Japanese film. Douban has 50,000 people give a rating of 7.7, which is lower than "Your Name." , but better than Weather Child.

Makoto Shinkai has long ceased to be niche, and the beautiful feelings of youth and unfulfilled regrets he wrote also have the value of being able to carry tens of billions of box office and leave a name in Japanese film history.

But to this day, he still tells a familiar story for the same group of teenagers.

A teenager who loves to draw landscapes

"Your name. Before its release, the Shintsu Group, a construction company with a century-old history in Nagano Prefecture, Japan, suddenly introduced the anime on its official website, and specially added a mark after the name of director Makoto Shinkai, "The son of our president."

Makoto Shinkai, whose real name is Makoto Shinzu, was born in Nagano Prefecture in the central part of the island of Honshu, Japan, the son of an entrepreneur and his mother's love of art, whose paintings have been selected for art exhibitions in Nagano Prefecture. Makoto Shinkai has expressed his love for Haruki Murakami several times, and the first Murakami book, Norwegian Forest, he read, came from his mother's bookshelf. He also loves science fiction for ten minutes, scanning almost every science fiction in the school library in elementary school, and will tweet years later to change the Japanese translation of "The Three-Body Problem."

Makoto Shinkai's impressive works are the blue sky and white clouds, the train tracks, and the sunset at dusk – his depiction of the picture is so beautiful that almost every frame can be captured as wallpaper. Most of the scenes in his films have a realistic basis, "Your Name. The vast Lake is based on Lake Suwa, a famous spot in Nagano Prefecture.

The scenery that young Makoto Shinkai passed by when riding his bicycle home became the prototype of those stunning scenery that appeared in the anime several times later. He once mentioned a preference for landscape depictions, "During the most painful period of adolescence, I was saved and inspired by beautiful landscapes, so if I could incorporate this feeling into the film, my mood would always be the same." ”

"Your name. Taki and Mitsuba meet at Lake Torsori in the background, and this large-scale scenery fragment is almost all derived from his childhood memories, "When I came to Tokyo, I often felt a sense of discord because the sunset no longer glowed brightly, and people said that my works loved to depict the sunset with extremely strong colors, which is actually the image left over from the scenery I saw when I was a teenager." ”

On the other hand, Makoto Shinkai's family situation did pave the way for Makoto Shinkai's "animation road": in the early 80s of last century, Makoto Shinkai, a fourth-grade elementary school, saw a computer on a leaflet, took it home and told his father that he wanted this "toy".

That computer sold for 700,000 yen, which was almost a big expense for any family in the 80s. Makoto Shinkai's father promised to buy him a computer at the top of the class in the next exam, and Makoto Shinkai, who had never been too interested in homework, really won the first place. My father kept his promise and bought him back a computer that the company didn't have. "Now that I think about it, it was because he bought that computer that he later embarked on the road to studying animation production at a game company." Makoto Shinkai's father said in an interview.

The openness of the family environment played a role in another turning point in Shinkai's fate.

In 1991, Makoto Shinkai was admitted to the Department of Japanese Literature at the Faculty of Literature at Chuo University, and when he was about to graduate from university, his father arranged for him to work at a friend's construction company, but Shinkai Makoto only went for a short time, then called his father and said that he had "a job that he had to do when he was young" and refused his father's arrangement.

His choice was Falcom, a well-known Japanese game manufacturer. Makoto Shinkai, who was unable to work in the development department, had to go to the group in charge of publicity and art. It was also at Falcom that Makoto Shinkai learned CG technology that would have a huge impact on future animation production, and also met his future music producer partner Tianmen.

At this stage, Makoto Shinkai began to experiment with animation, first in black and white animated short films, and in 2000, his independent 5-minute black-and-white animation "She and Her Cat" came out, which won the 12th CG animation competition Grand Prix. At the same time, Falcom began to focus on the development of the game "Double Star Story", and Makoto Shinkai felt that it was difficult to juggle it, so he quit his job at Falcom.

"She and Her Cat"

The work that made him quit his job and devote himself to it was his first true color animation "Voice of the Stars". Falcom's work experience laid the groundwork for the refinement of Shinkai Makoto's 3D technology, and although "Voice of the Stars" is only 25 minutes, he has done all the work of directing, drawing and editing independently, which has shocked the industry.

Chinese audiences are most familiar with his work, in Your Name. Before that, it was undoubtedly "Five Centimeters Per Second" that "wanted people to blow up the tram".

560,000 people scored the movie 8.3 points on Douban, and "the speed of cherry blossoms falling is 5 centimeters per second", which became a common QQ signature of that era.

Everyone who has seen this movie is almost affirming Shinkai Makoto's ultimate pursuit of the picture, but for the quality of the story, the audience's evaluation is quite two-level: netizens who watched "Five Centimeters Per Second" to tears, recognized this delicate depiction of youthful youth; The part of the audience who was not impressed by the movie thought that the plot was bland and pretentious, and they might have to drag the progress bar twice as fast to watch.

This became almost a universal evaluation of every Shinkai Makoto film in the future - until "Your Name." " was born.

Commercial directors towards tens of billions

In 2011, "Children Chasing Stars" was released. Compared with Makoto Shinkai's previous works, the story of "Children Chasing Stars" breaks away from the simple youthful hearts of boys and girls and begins to expand to a larger theme.

But this anime with a unique style in Shinkai's works cannot be regarded as a successful "breakthrough work" - its box office results are not satisfactory, and because of the similarity of characters and themes, it is regarded by some fans as a parody and challenge to Miyazaki.

The failure of this attempt made Makoto Shinkai change his direction, and the next movie "The Garden of Words" returned to the adolescent love affair he was good at, the familiar aesthetic picture and atmosphere rendering, the movie's reputation has increased significantly, and the box office has reached 150 million yen.

"The Garden of Words"

The next work is Your Name. 》。 Xinhai Cheng has made the earth-shattering changes in the world and the story of youth love just right, and even the regretful ending that has always made the audience's stomach ache has a complete ending, and the picky netizens finally let go: "This film profoundly tells us how terrible a Brother Cheng with a good script is." ”

The names of Ghibli Animation and Hayao Miyazaki are like a mountain hanging over the Japanese animation film industry, and "Your Name." is the first animated film to exceed 10 billion yen at the box office besides Miyazaki's works. Its overseas success was equally remarkable, with films released in 125 countries around the world, and "Your Name" before being broken by the theatrical version of "Ghost Slayer". is the highest-grossing film in the history of Japanese cinema.

Although the animated films he directed are beautiful and dreamy, emotionally delicate, and he is also an independent animation producer, Makoto Shinkai himself is quite clear about his identity - he is a commercial animation director.

Shinkai Makoto said in a recent interview: "I have a team of more than 1,000 people, and the movies are hundreds of millions of box office, I am not making an art film, literary film, nor do I want to show myself." Then I definitely have to look at the market, to see what the market wants to do, what the market likes, and in this is what the audience wants to see. Observing what the audience wants to see is my own job. ”

For Makoto Shinkai, self-expression and making commercial films are not contradictory. It seems that all he needs to do is try to find balance and "do the best possible" in one work at a time.

This "effort" finds a footnote in the increasing commercial elements of his films: the commercial animation process is very elaborate, "Weather Child" has 1700 shots, and each shot is almost an hour to discuss. He doesn't even have the procrastination common to "artists", the production cycle of animated films takes at least two years, and he and his team make daily plans and work according to them.

In addition to telling good stories, Shinkai further refines the short-term emotional rendering he is good at as an emotional curve. "Your name. THE EPISODE OF RADWIMPS IMPRESSED MANY AUDIENCES, AND MAKOTO SHINKAI THOUGHT AT THE BEGINNING THAT THE MOMENT WHEN THE FOUR SONGS SOUNDED HAPPENED TO BE PLACED AT EVERY CLIMAX OF THE MOVIE'S PLOT.

The design of the characters will also move in a more likable direction in the initial stage. "Your name. In the script creation stage, I repeatedly held meetings with the team of Toho Co., Ltd., originally the heroine Mitsuba would have a longing senior, but slowly "empathized" in the process of exchanging bodies with the male protagonist, but someone at the script meeting proposed that this setting would be hated by the audience, so the protagonist of "Longing Senior" became the male protagonist Taki. In this "Journey to the Bell Bud", the image of the children's chair possessed by the male protagonist is that Makoto Shinkai believes that the theme of the movie is a natural disaster, but commercial movies need to entertain the audience, so it is necessary to add a cute and bright element to the heavy theme.

Makoto Shinkai selected by the times

Since Makoto Shinkai achieved a box office achievement of tens of billions and broke the record left by Hayao Miyazaki, "Is Makoto Shinkai the successor of Hayao Miyazaki" has become a topic of war of words for a long time.

Poison Eye has no intention of making a judgment here, but from Makoto Shinkai's previous works, it is indeed clear why he was "chosen" by the times.

An interesting statistic is that Maoyan Professional Edition shows that 52.8% of the portraits of users who want to see "Lingbud Journey" are male, and 77.5% of users under 30 years old, of which 20 years old account for the highest proportion. This is especially rare in the user portraits of movies - even in the sci-fi film "The Wandering Earth 2", male user portraits account for only 45.9%, lower than female users; Among the user portraits of the latest film of "Bear Haunted", users under the age of 20 accounted for 23.3%, which is also lower than "Journey to the Bell Buds" (35%).

Makoto Shinkai has already given the answer behind this phenomenon: his audience is closer to young audiences in their teens and twenties than Miyazaki's animated films for all ages. He once mentioned that he likes to do the same thing in his own field, "although some directors don't like to do the same thing repeatedly, I will not hesitate to do what I am good at."

This brings Makoto Shinkai's animated films closer to the definition of "genre film". When the audience sees Makoto Shinkai's "signboard", they can know that what they will see is a Japanese romance film with beautiful pictures, and the content they see when they enter the cinema is highly consistent with expectations, and they will basically not be subjected to "marketing fraud".

On the other hand, although Makoto Shinkai's works also have a grand proposition of "saving the world", it seems that what falls in the end is always a return to ordinary real life.

He wrote in Your Name. The promotion mentioned that while working for a game company, he made the world of swords and magic, but had a stronger desire to depict the real world, and eventually left Falcom.

The focus on the real world turns the protagonists of his story into ordinary people who walk in their daily lives. Asuna from "Children Chasing the Stars" finally embarked on her way home, "Your Name." Taki and Mitsuba forget about saving the town, and in "Suzuya's Journey", Iwato Suzuya returns to his original life after completing the "long journey" of closing doors.

At the same time, Makoto Shinkai's keen sense of smell will always detect the social emotions under the undercurrent, revealing the healing of social anxiety in the film. And focusing on "ordinary people" can better allow the audience to empathize.

The so-called "disaster trilogy" is almost the emotional aftershock left by the Kanto earthquake in Japan in 2011. Before that, a stable society kept people's lives the same, so there were small but timeless emotional ups and downs in daily life such as "Five Centimeters Per Second", but after the earthquake, the social mood of the Japanese people changed, and Makoto Shinkai's works also changed, depicting the uncertainty of disasters and the "hope" of preventing disasters from occurring.

In "Journey to the Bell Bud", he positioned the object possessed by the male protagonist as a children's chair with a missing leg, and explained in an interview: "On the one hand, it symbolizes the encouragement to the victims: although there are shortcomings in life, we must still work hard." On the other hand, in the past few years, we have all had moments when we are closed off and cannot feel freedom, and our feelings about life resonate with Kusanagi's situation. ”

There are many scientific and technological products of modern society in Shinkai's works, "Your Name. The dialogue between the male protagonist and the female protagonist after the body exchange was completed through mobile phone messages, and the signpost of the female protagonist's journey all the way in "Lingbud Journey" is a chance encounter photo of the onlookers on social media to the kitten "minister".

And the distance and loneliness that are common in his films have also become common social diseases in the SNS era. The famous line in "Five Centimeters Per Second" "Even if we exchange text messages a thousand times, the distance between hearts can only be one centimeter closer", which is the unique "loneliness" of modern society.

Station B UP master "Muyu Shuixin" once commented on the difference between Makoto Shinkai and Hayao Miyazaki: "From the perspective of theme, Hayao Miyazaki talks about the harmonious coexistence between man and nature, while Makoto Shinkai discusses the gap and longing between people's hearts. I don't know if this represents a trend, or maybe it is the difference of the times that makes the difference between the two. ”

At the end of Makoto Shinkai's first true color animation "Voice of the Stars", the voices of the male and female protagonists gradually overlap in this sentence: "Although we are far away from each other, our thoughts may transcend time and distance." ”

This is the eternal motif of Makoto Shinkai's work, and it is also his warm answer to this lonely and alienated SNS era.