From an early age, Suzume director Makoto Shinkai has been fascinated by the vastness of the sky. Fans of his work know this. In his films, twilight stretches for eternity. Early evening sunbeams peak through gentle strokes of deep pink and sapphire, casting a warm purple glow below. Time stands still in the blue hour between day and night. It's a moment caught in amber.
The anime auteur's latest film, Suzume, puts a name to this place beyond time. He calls it the Ever-After, an interdimensional realm for lost souls. And it's here, in the twinkling of the stars, that teenage Suzume comes face to face with her four-year-old self. It's a scene we've all fantasized about once or twice, or dozens of times: What would I say to my younger self? Shinkai, who recently turned 50, has thought a lot about this too. "I think people do that every day," the animator tells Teen Vogue.
We're in a hotel just a few blocks away from Central Park, where Shinkai is stationed for a round of afternoon press interviews. It's his first trip to New York in more than a decade, and the city has greeted him with crisp, March air and gray clouds. It's not quite as picturesque as a still from one of his films, but Shinkai can find magic anywhere. Next to him sits his interpreter, Mikey McNamara, who scribbles shorthand on an iPad while Shinkai explains the significance of the film's most pivotal scene. "There's this desire to communicate with the younger versions of ourselves, to deliver some kind of message," he says. "You want to tell yourself, 'Things might be really challenging right now, school might be tough, but it's going to get better.' Every day, we're faced with these instances. I think our present self is really just communicating with our future self and our past self and bridging that gap."
To understand Shinkai as he exists right now, you need to first picture him as a boy — small, curious, a perpetual daydreamer. He grew up in Koumi, a tiny inland town in Japan's Nagano Prefecture surrounded by mountains. With a population of just a few thousand, there wasn't much for young Shinkai to do other than look up.
"At the time the internet didn't exist," he laughs. “When I was in grade school a huge part of entertainment for me was the silver screen. I felt like looking up at the screen was kind of similar to looking up at the sky. I was an odd kid who, for two, three hours, could continuously look up at the sky and really savor that change — [the] transition from day to sunset to night, how the stars begin to appear.”
He found comfort in the lushly animated works of Hayao Miyazaki, most notably Castle in the Sky. He saw himself in the young orphan Pazu, who longed to escape his reality and expand his vision of the world. Pazu's call to adventure reinforced Shinkai's own curiosity and desire for more. You'll see this longing reflected in many of his adolescent protagonists. In his debut short, Voices of a Distant Star — which he wrote, directed, animated, and voiced himself — a teenage girl takes off for a deep-space mission, putting lightyears between her and her childhood sweetheart. 5 Centimeters Per Second illustrates a young man at different stages of his life, still yearning for the girl who stole his heart as a boy. Mitsuha, the fiery high schooler at the center of Shinkai's most famous film, Your Name, dreams of life beyond the walls of her family shrine, so she makes an idle wish to be reborn as a handsome boy in Tokyo (and fate complies).
That's a feeling Shinkai knew well. He fantasized of the Tokyo skyline. So for university, he moved to the bustling metropolis, where he studied Japanese literature at the prestigious Chuo University. He still lives in Tokyo today, and he pours his love for the city into every frame. When you're a visitor, you experience a city in decibels; everything is so loud and the streets buzz with excitement. But Shinkai captures the stillness of the city — the overhead power lines that hang quietly in the air, the overgrown weeds that sprout through the pavement, the cherry blossoms that fall past the couples who are content to coexist in silence. He describes his home as quaint. There's a peacefulness to his cityscapes, to how he illustrates the innate inertia of everyday life.
This fondness for Tokyo, for life, stems from the realization that in an instance it could all be gone. Suzume, like Your Name and Weathering With You before it, deals heavily with the physical and emotional fallout of ecological disaster — a familiar and unsettling reality for those who live in Japan. "Part of us as a species is built to love the place that we were born," he says. “I'm constantly amazed that in spite of this earthquake-prone country of Japan, we continue to live our lives. And we've been doing it for thousands of years.”
The film opens with a young Suzume wandering alone through the wreckage of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that ravaged the Tōhoku region of northeast Japan. She's crying out for her mother, who we learn has died from the cataclysmic event. (An estimated 20,000 people perished as a result of the magnitude 9.0 earthquake and the resulting tsunami.) Flash forward, Suzume, now 17, lives with her aunt on the small southern island of Kyushu, going through the motions of young adulthood. One day, she meets a beautiful boy with heartthrob hair on her way to school, and thus kicks off an adventure that takes her on a journey up Japan's coastline to close a number of doors that open to the Ever-After.
For all of its enchanting beauty, the Ever-After harbors a destructive entity that manifests as a giant worm with angry, red tendrils. It seeks to escape through these mystical doors and cause destruction; if the worm touches the ground, the earth will tremble and trigger a seismic earthquake. The only way to stop it is to close all of the doors, which are located in Japan's abandoned ruins. These places signify the country's abundance of haikyo — the Japanese word for ruins — caused by disaster and population decline. To close the doors, Suzume must picture the place as it once was, vibrant and full of life, and return these memories to the Ever-After.
When Shinkai pitched the film to producers, he expected some hesitation. After all, he's best known for telling fantastical tales of teen romance. But the lingering trauma of the disaster still weighs on those in Japan, and a film like this felt particularly necessary for a generation of young people who were born in its aftermath.
"I wanted to depict in some ways Japan in its current state," Shinkai says. “So when I got to thinking about what that meant exactly, I came to the conclusion of how our daily lives are constantly surrounded by the threat of disaster in some capacity.”
While the film was in production, COVID-19 effectively shut down the city. The film took on a more potent meaning for Shinkai, who watched his tween daughter process the pandemic in real time. "Putting myself in her shoes, that her reality could be uprooted at any given second, how is she supposed to live in this world? I hope that Suzume can provide some kind of beacon for younger audiences to be able to understand and interpret how they have to live side by side with disaster."
In some ways, Suzume is a classic Shinkai archetype: strong-willed, impulsive, and desperately looking for human connection. In others, she's unlike any other character he's created. She says she's not afraid to die, but in actuality, she's scared to live. Because that means she has to finally reckon with the loss of her mom. For Suzume, the line between life and death is blurry. In the film, her trauma takes physical shape in the form of a three-legged children's chair. It was built by her mom just weeks before the earthquake. (It was inspired by the chair Shinkai's father made for him when he was a boy.) The wooden chair also serves as the film's comedic relief, as Souta — the aforementioned beautiful boy — eventually becomes the chair. It's a truly bizarre plot device, but it serves both to add levity to the film and to make Suzume the hero of her own story, while Souta embodies the role of the anthropomorphic sidekick.
Suzume took roughly three years to make. Shinkai spent six months writing the screenplay, then another 15 months crafting the storyboard by himself, mapping out the film across 2,000 cuts and assembling them into a two-hour video storyboard, in which he animatedly records all of the dialogue himself in his home. (A few hours after our interview, he'll demonstrate exactly what that sounds like at an intimate screening of the film.) He describes making the visual storyboard as the most challenging part of his creative process. To clear his head, he'd often walk to a local graveyard where he could remove his mask and breathe fresh air. He'd burn incense and tidy up the graves, taking the time to pay his respects before returning to his home studio. Once complete, the scratch track becomes a guide for both the animators and the voice actors. A few hundred animators worked on Suzume for over 19 months, painstakingly bringing Shinkai's ambitious vision to life.
No one was happier to see the finished product than his now 12-year-old daughter. "I was really cooped up in production for two-and-a-half years, so she would constantly bother me and say, 'Dad, are you still working on Suzume? How come this film isn't done yet?' I think there's probably some degree of frustration on her part. Eventually, when it was complete, she got to see the film, and her first reaction was, 'I want to see it again right away.' And that moved me. She cried, she was moved, and it was definitely an emotional journey for her. But the idea that she wanted to see it again, right away, meant the most to me."
Shinkai believes that animation, in its purest essence, is for young people. It's a medium that helps children and teens like his daughter make sense of the world around them.
"I also understand and respect that there are older demographics and audiences who are able to experience things through animation," he says. “But personally, having seen anime as a young teenager, it saved me in many ways. When you think about what's happening at school or what's happening at home, animation takes you to a completely different world. So for me, it's not so much about trying to tell a story through their lens as much as trying to deliver a message to the younger version of myself.”
That message sounds a lot like the one Suzume tells her grieving younger self in the Ever-After. Through big, wet tears she gives herself a hug and says, "The night might seem endless right now, but one day morning will come, and you'll grow up basking in that light." In that moment suspended in time, these are the words that Suzume, past and present and future, needed to hear. And Shinkai hopes they resonate with everyone who finds themselves lost in their own in-between twilight. "No matter how immense the tragedy, people can overcome it," he says.
As he looks ahead at the start of a new decade of his life, he knows the passage of time is carrying him further away from his young audience. The feelings of isolation and desperation he once felt in his youth are now the memories that paint his skies, no longer as intense and vibrant as they once were. So, what does that mean for his next work? "I don't know how much longer I can continue telling stories about these themes," he muses. "Perhaps at some point, it's time for me to explore a different idea." Then, he smiles. That's a conversation he's saving for his future self.
