 It's an honor for me to be here on the stage with one of my favorite anime directors, Shinkai Makoto, and I really urge you to go see his new film tomorrow on the screen here at the New York Anime Festival. It's a great opportunity. We're just going to talk about a few sort of topics that we've tossed back and forth and sort of introduce some of you who might not know much about Shinkai-san, but also to explore some of his themes and ideas and obsessions in his work. As Vin said, he's one of the very few young anime artists who is compared favorably with Hayao Miyazaki in Japan, even though he doesn't accept that at all. So I want to talk a little bit about his work as an artist. So the first thing I'd like to address is Shinkai-san is your background, which as some of you may know, Shinkai-san does not come from a conventional illustrator's background. Anime in Japan is still very much a 2D hand-drawn labor-intensive art form. Shinkai-san has a background in computer graphics and in the gaming industry. So my first question is, how does that affect you as an artist? How does that make you different from a conventional or traditional anime artist? So first up, I want to say thank you for them. Hello everyone. No, actually my English is very bad, so I need to translate. So thank you for coming here. This is the first time for me coming to New York. It's a very big ski. Yeah, amazing. So after this panel, I want to go to Akustwa. I hope you enjoy this panel. Thank you. So first of all, like we said, my background isn't digital. Whereas for example, in traditional places like Ghibli, they do everything hand-drawn. When I first started making these videos, I was an amateur, I was working in a gaming company. But I really wanted to make animation. So I didn't really have any special tools at my disposal, so I just used what I had, like Photoshop, and that's really how I started. You also did, obviously you created as Vince noted, she and her cat on your own. Do you think that having the background that you have in CGI enables you to be a more generous artist? As many of you know, Shinkansen is a triple threat. He basically writes, illustrates, animates, directs. He does the whole thing. He's an anime auteur of the highest order. Do you think your background in computers and digital graphics helps you? So, this was in around 1998 when I started making on Shinkansen. What I did was, I started making on my own, and I wanted to make a lot of people curious. So when I started making on my own, I started making on my own. I started making on my own. I started making on my own, and I started making on my own. I started making. What I did was I, at that time cameras were being really cheap and anyone started using them. So I started going around and took my digital camera and I took photos of city-states and the streets and I used those images uploaded to my computer and used those as the foundation for the drawings that I made. And since I was working alone I had to draw a lot of pictures, destroying a lot of pictures. This is going to be a kind of user-friendly question. I know from other conventions that I attended and from this one that there are usually a number of people in the audience who wouldn't mind becoming animators themselves if they aren't already. So I wonder, since we're on this topic, what kind of advice would you give to someone today who sees your work and your accomplishments and would like to pursue the kind of art that you make? Well, compared to what I started making 10 years ago, I think the current environment is still in good condition. There's good software, good hardware, and there's internet, so you can make it right away in front of people and get feedback. It's really rare and I think it's good to do it, but at the same time, it's too easy to make things and get them out of the way too easily. I think the time to think about what I want to make is getting shorter. I think it's time to put in the things that I want to make and wait for them to come out. So it's good to be able to make things easily, but at the same time it's going to be a merit. Well, compared to what I started 10 years ago, now the technology is amazing. There's so many things you guys can use to support you to help you with your animation, and now you can really easily get this information out of the way. So I think it's good to be able to make things easily, but at the same time, it's good to be able to make things easily. And now you can really easily get this information out to just about anyone in many different ways. Because of that, though, I think that the amount of time that people take to really develop their ideas has gotten shorter, so I think it's really important to not only take advantage of these tools to have a dream as proposal, but also to really take the time to develop these ideas within yourself and really think about what you want to animate, and then you can use these tools to create what you want to create. It's interesting you talked about using photographs and walking around with a digital camera and taking a lot of pictures for the illustrations. And I'm wondering what drew you personally to create animation? Because, you know, I actually mentioned your use of photographs to a friend of mine recently in Boston, and she quite innocently said, well, why didn't he just use the photographs? You know, he's taking these great photographs. Why not just be a photographer or use the photos? Instead, obviously, you're using the photos to make animation. Why do you do that? Well, one reason is that I personally really, really like hand-drawn animation. However, again, just as you guys know, when you're doing hand-drawn animation, it's not just one picture, it's many, many, many pictures put together, and that takes a lot of time. So I use the photos to sort of shorten the amount of time that's required to draw these pictures, but it's the effect of the hand-drawn animation. And then the other thing, as to why I actually started doing this, I live in Tokyo, and just like any other major city in Tokyo, New York, people say they're not really beautiful cities. However, I really wanted to think of my city as a beautiful city. So things like an image of the sky for the buildings, or a bunch of letters sticking out of a mailbox. Little moments like this I think are really beautiful, and I wanted to capture that. So I would take photos of the city escape, and then use that as a foundation to draw something even more beautiful. I wanted to create normally a beautiful city, just sort of in my mind, but also in reality. Would you ever consider setting a film in the ugly city of New York? Well, you know, New York is already the location for a lot of things that exist. So even if I do that now, I mean, it's not really... At least there's an Apple Store. Okay, let's talk a little bit about storytelling and writing. We were looking at the gorgeous visuals on the screen, but as many of you know, who've seen Shinkaisen's films, it's not merely a beautiful thing to look at, but the stories are quite moving and quite profound. In fact, when I was in Tokyo, I showed five centimeters per second to a writer friend of mine, and he just felt the quality of the stories themselves. There's three linked short fictions, actually. It was just astonishing. Can you talk a little bit about your writing process, Shinkaisen, how you start drafting the story and how it comes together? Well, the story is quite different, but the first thing I think about is the words, the characters' lines. For example, in 5 centimeters per second, the heroine's daughter says that she's going to watch a movie with her next year. Those words make me think of it as a bad story. So I write it down and go home. So I start with words in 5 centimeters per second. One of the lines that one of the characters says is, I hope that we can see the cherry blossoms together again next year. So using that line, I think about what sort of an image, what sort of a situation you would have that sort of a line, and then the story sort of grows. And then, for example, I often get asked how to write a story, and one more thing, I have been influenced by a lot of people, but I really liked the work of Murakami Haruki. I was studying North Korean culture in college, but I didn't study much, so I was only reading the works of Murakami. I think I have a lot of interest in writing literature, but I really like it. So the final part is a video, but I'm going to start with the first one, and finish it up with literature. So that's another thing. Well, another thing I do is I take inspiration from the works that I like. When I was a student, I actually was a literature major, but really I just spent all of my time reading Miyazaki's books, which I really, really enjoy. So this is a question I'm asked often, so that's another thing that I do, is I look for inspiration from the works that I really enjoy. It struck me very recently, actually after finishing Murakami Haruki's fourth coming novel, Ichi-kyu-hachi-yo-in, one Q8 for, I guess, in English, which, well, it's not a giveaway to anyone, features a love story and a story of two people who are trying to get back together after having an initial encounter, a romantic encounter. I'm not telling anymore. But of course, as I was reading it, I suddenly thought, wow, that seems familiar. And as many of you know, who've seen Shinkaisan's work, they often feature love stories and often quite melancholic love stories about losing touch, losing contact with the person of your affections. So I wonder if I could ask you a kind of blunt question. Do you think love is doomed? Yes, I think so. Well, in reality, there are many things that are more likely to go wrong than going well. No one is tied to the person of the first coming novel. So in the animation series, rather than writing a story about being tied to the person of the first coming novel, you don't have to work on anything at all. You don't need a goal to show your true self. You need to prove that you still have something beautiful and happy. If you can prove it in the film, I think you can give your sympathies more. And I think that there are such great stories that go wrong. Well, I mean, I think love isn't doomed, of course. But, you know, in real life, love doesn't always work out. you know, sometimes your first love, if you don't end up with that person you fell in love with, and things like that. So, I mean, I think I'm just really reflecting what real life is like, and also, you know, the stories, even if you don't end up with the person you like, you can still enjoy life, you can still enjoy the beautiful things in life, and I think that that's really the message that I was trying to portray. It's great because I happen to think love is doomed, but that's... Seriously, another element of Shinkaisa in this film is not, obviously, we've talked about visuals here a little bit, a little bit about story, but also the music is just so well selected. I think it merges at the right point in the film. It doesn't overwhelm the film. A brilliant selection of music for the soundtrack. I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about that process. How do you go about selecting music? But, for example, for 5 Centimers per Second, I decided after creating the story that I wanted to use a song from the 90s. So, I listened to a lot of popular hit songs from the 90s, and ultimately, the one that I liked was the one that you hear in the movie, which is one more like Homework. So, at the end of the film, I didn't want to make a song that would be played by a famous person just like I did in the movie. So, I asked the artist, Mr. Kumaki, to come to the studio, read the script, read the script, and introduce the staff. And I became the first member of the production team of the film, and I wanted to make her the song that would come out of it. So, I thought that the music of the film would match the essence of the film. And then, for example, and as you'll hear if you go to the premiere tomorrow, in Children Who Chase, the Lost Voices, there was a person whose name was Kumaki, and she actually, what I did, I didn't want to use a famous person's song. So, what we did was we found her and we invited her to come down to the studio, she met the staff, she read the script, and she really became a member of the team, and then she created the song from the feelings that she developed as being a team member for this movie. So, you know, it's not like an independent project, she really was part of the creation of the movie. So, she created the movie, and she asked her to make this kind of song. And of course, there are times when it doesn't match her image, right? So, I asked her to re-create the song, and I'm really happy about that, but she didn't want to do that. So, no matter how many times you say it, even if you say it ten times, it becomes two and a half times ten times and you re-create the song, right? So, I'm doing all of that with this kind of music, and that's what I'm doing right now. Also, if you guys notice from the movies, someone that I use very frequently as a background music creator for a lot of the movies is Tenma. And he is actually a senior member from the game company that I used to work at, and so, you know, whenever we tell him, you know, we need a song for this, and he would just create it for us. And sometimes, you know, the songs didn't quite match what we were expecting, but no matter how many times we'd ask him to rewrite it, even if it was five, ten, twenty times, he would always smile and just fix it, and he would always work out, and it'd be great. This is a very practical question. When you visit anime studios in Japan, they're usually quite small. You're obviously not working solo anymore. Roughly, how many people you work with and what your staff does? So, at most, we actually have about 20 main staff. I personally am the animator and the background artist, but in terms of any sort of small animations that need to be done or individual character drawings, we have about 200 artists. We have about 200 staff within the studio. I was in Tokyo for quite a while, and one of the staff members was a Korean girl, and she didn't have confidence in Korea, so she cried a lot in Korea. She cried a lot in Korea, saying, Mom, Mom, Mom. Well, I mean, I don't know if this is not that big, but there's not very many people who doesn't feel that small. However, for example, and actually everyone that really does love ramen, when we were making children who chase lost voices was actually during that huge earthquake that hit Japan, as you guys probably know about. And actually, we felt some of that shaking down in Tokyo, and one of the animators actually who works in the studio was actually from Korea, and she doesn't have a lot of experience with earthquakes. She was really scared into crying and yelling what had happened. And actually, her mom sent us a care package from Korea that among other things had a whole bunch of Korean ramen noodles in it, so that really saved us. Because of that time, food was kind of scarce, so that care package really saved us. I have nothing against ramen. Quickly switch over to the new film, because some of you will be attending it tomorrow. To some extent, children who chase lost voices, hopefully, is a departure in a way from Shin Kaesan's earlier work. There's still beautiful imagery, the sort of brilliant rendering of very Japanese textures is in this film as well. And there is, of course, a love story of sorts in the story itself. But the narrative actually takes off into quasi-mythical worlds. And almost has an unworthiness nature to it in its exploration of an underworld called the Garta, actually. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about this new film and why you took off in a more epic direction in the story. So yes, as you said, this story is a little bit different. In this one we have the characters who go sort of down to hell or to the underground, they're trying to summon someone who has passed away. You can see, actually, in a traditional Japanese story called the Koteki, which is a historical film story. And you'll see a lot of epic stories as well. So to answer the question though, sort of one of the big reasons is, well, for example, when we were doing five centimeters per second, at that time Japan was sort of in an era where it felt like nothing would ever change. So I wanted to make a movie that really sort of reflected that sort of feeling. When I first started making the movie, I was very confident that it would still happen in the future. For example, when I was in America, I didn't even have a small theater in Japan. So I felt that the everyday life in Japan would continue like this. I felt that the atmosphere of being unable to believe in the circumstances was something that we had in our society. So the next work I'm going to do is not to draw the everyday life in Japan, but rather to make a work where the everyday life is lost. I wanted to tell you about how we're going to recover from that. That's why I'm going to go back to the western world this time. I'm going to go back to the western world this time. However, when we made the new movie, there were sort of a lot of things happening. This is actually before the earthquake happened, but there were things happening around the world. For example, like that earthquake in Chile that was really starting to have an effect on Japan. It really kind of made not only me, but really a lot of people think that maybe things would actually not stay the same after all. So I really wanted to create a movie that reflected that sort of change and maybe realizing that, yes, things actually are going to start changing. So that's why the main character in the movie has to go to another world. I mean eventually it should come back, but there's that sort of sense that maybe things are going to be lost, that things are going to change, that things are going to not be the same. We talked about the two big M's, Miyazaki and Murakami. Are there any other artists that come to mind, specific artists who you consider influences on your work or artists that seem like models for you? Well first of all, the creator of Evangelion, I don't know if you've ever seen Evangelion's last two series, but I think there are people who have seen Evangelion's last two series, but I think that you can do it only with the conversation and the political change of the people in the audience. I think that you can do it only with the political change of the people in the audience. When I was a student, I thought that you can do it even if you don't have to act in the anime. I don't know if it was busy in that sense, and maybe it wasn't meant to be, but even with the conversation and the political change of the people in the audience, I was really attracted to it. So I wanted to see how to make the last two series of Evangelion and try to make an animation. I'm sure you guys are aware, but the last few episodes of Eva has some very interesting, sort of departed from the rest of the series and things going on in there. And when I saw that when I was at college, I thought it was amazing. There were just scenes where not much was done. And I thought, wow, this is also animation. This is animation. It doesn't always have to be about crazy movements and lots of action. Sometimes it's also about the words that are being spoken, or maybe even the lack of words that are not being spoken. So I really, that movie has had a big impact. I'm just going to have a round of applause, which incites something.