Framing Makoto Shinkai: 15 Years of Anime Art from the Director of “Your Name”

6 min readDec 13, 2017

An interview with Kazuki Sunami, Managing Director at CoMix Wave Films

By Patrick Macias

Anime director Makoto Shinkai delivered a blockbuster hit with his 2016 anime movie Your Name. The film, which broke box office records in Japan and became a genuine cultural phenomenon, is now being developed for a live-action remake by J.J. Abrams and Paramount Pictures.

Meanwhile, the 45 year old filmmaker now finds himself the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the prestigious National Art Center in Tokyo; making him the only living anime director ever to receive such an honor.

In part one of an exclusive interview, Kazuki Sunami — Managing Director at CoMix Wave Films(the studio and distribution company that handles Makoto Shinkai’s films) — recalls the early days and struggles of working together with Shinkai on his very first batch of films and the journey leading up to Your Name. Enjoy!

Crunchyroll News: How did Makoto Shinkai come to have such a large scale exhibition at the National Museum?

Kazuki Sunami: Obviously, Your Name becoming a hit is what has made Makoto Shinkai’s name known to many people, so that’s one big reason. I’ve worked on other Shinkai art exhibitions before, but they were much smaller than this one. But now the success of Your Name is allowing him to have a larger exhibition at the National Museum.

Many people are just getting to know Shinkai and they are starting to go back to his previous titles. Your Name was an entry into his work for many people, and they might be wondering who he is and what his animation techniques are, so you can learn about that from this exhibition.

There is a team who has been working on the promotion of Shinkai’s films and are involved with choosing animation materials; such as key frames or in between animation or background art, for the exhibit which covers, six titles in total and 15 years of work. It’s a huge, huge amount of material, so CoMix Wave Films is part of that. Also, we are part of the production committee for the exhibition.

“Voices of a Distant Star” A key frame by Makoto Shinkai, a director
© Makoto Shinkai / CoMix Wave Films

What do remember about Makoto Shinkai when you first met him?

It was back in 2001. I was working at a company called “MANGAZOO”. The goal was to make it a distribution platform for digital manga, but it was too early, so it was mostly an information site. Around then, the site started to promote some animation shorts. Again, this was really early… there was no YouTube or social media back then. I remember one of our staff found this guy who sold CD ROMs with a 5 min short on it. The film was She and Her Cat, which Shinkai had made all by himself. At that time, he was burning all the discs himself and was selling them at places like Comic Market. This was when he was still working at a PC game company. He worked at his job five days a week from morning until late at night. Then he would come home at work on his animation shorts and burn CDs and then sell then. That’s too many jobs for one person… especially burning CD-Rs (laughs). So we told him, “let us make the discs and sell them for you at least”. So that was the first time we met.

After that, we heard he wanted to make a 30 min film, but he said it didn’t seem like he could do it while still working his day job, so we said, hey, why don’t we cover your costs to create this new work?

She and Her Cat was only five minutes long, but it was clear that Shinkai had extraordinary talent. We thought “this guy is a genius” and that we should support him. When we saw the trailer for Voices of a Distant Star (eventually released in 2009) we knew it was to be a good title. In addition, we’d already sold 3,000 CD-Rs of the discs we burned for him, so we thought if we help Shinkai make another film, at least we’d be able to sell them.

“Children Who Chase Lost Voices” A concept board by Takumi Tanji, an art director
© Makoto Shinkai / CMMMY

How has having access to more staff and resources changed his production methods?

In his early productions, Shinkai worked like a one man band, doing everything on the production himself, including the main character’s voices. So when he moved onto the next feature — The Place Promised in Our Early Days (2004) — he could finish an entire production with just a three person staff — Shinkai (director), an animation director, and Tenmon, a musician. Originally, the work was supposed to be 60 min, but it wound up being 90 min.

He basically thought he could do it all in the beginning. We didn’t know either. There were like 1000 cuts. How long would it take to draw the background art? Maybe 1 or 2 days. That makes it easy to calculate: you have 1000 cuts and you need 1000 background art, you need 2000 days…. That’s what, 5 years?

So we realized it was impossible to meet the deadline (the film had already been booked in theaters). So the next day, the film’s line producer went to Tokyo Art University and began to scout for people who could draw background art.

But uniquely, Shinkai came into animation digitally; he did everything on his Macintosh. So at the same time we were recruiting art students to draw animation backgrounds we had to teach them how to draw digital background art like Shinkai did. But the students who were recruited were from like oil painting classes and had never used PCs, so they had to start at the level of learning how to use a mouse (laughs). So that was a big change to learn how to work with other staff.

“your name.” Modification of the layout by Masashi Ando, animation director
© 2016 TOHO / CoMix Wave Films / KADOKAWA / JR Kikaku / AMUSE / voque ting / Lawson HMV Entertainment

Has his personality changed at all over the last 15 years?

Actually, Shinkai’s basic personality hasn’t changed. He’s very calm and nice to everyone, especially his staff. He’s the kind of guy who will buy coffee for the group when he comes to a meeting. I think most of the staff wants to work with him again after they’ve worked with him before. But what I think what has changed is, every time he makes a movie, he kind of realizes what’s missing from the previous work, maybe communicating with the audience or some animation technique he’s used wasn’t enough. So I think every time he makes a new work, he sets a benchmark that he wants to try and reach. So he’s continuously trying to progress from his previous works.

Exhibition of Shinkai Makoto is currently on display at the National Art Center, Tokyo

The following titles are now available for viewing on Crunchyroll!