Renaissance Josei

The last twenty years has been a good time for original anime films.  Studio Ghibli has (mostly) relinquished its dominance of the scene, thanks to the passing of Isao Takahata, Hayao Miyazaki’s off-and-on retirement, and Goro Miyazaki’s fruitless struggle toward competence.  That’s left a space for a lot of up-and-coming directors and studios to try their hand at similar sorts of crowd-pleasing animated films.  One of the few to find true, lasting success at it has been Makoto Shinkai. Shinkai’s directorial career began quite modestly.   He first gained notoriety in the early 2000s for producing a series of delicately emotional, digitally-animated shorts entirely on his own computer.   While his productions grew in size, length, and scope over time, he never abandoned his focus on telling stories about young adults tentatively finding love against a backdrop of urban beauty.   This culminated in 2016’s Your Name , which became one of the most successful ...