This bibliography covers the scholarly publications on Makoto Shinkai and his works written in English that I am aware of.
(Updated: August 18, 2022)
Forthcoming
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Izumi, Katsuya. Saviours of the world: Impersonality and success in Shinkai Makoto’s animated films.
In Shih-Wen Sue Chen & Sin Wen Lau (eds.). Representations of children and success in Asia: Dream chasers (pp. 202-211). Abington, UK. Routledge.
“This chapter analyzes how Shinkai Makoto, a Japanese animation film director, has built a new image of the teenage hero who reflects shifts in cultural values during the Heisei period (1989–2019). Focusing on the teenagers, Mitsuha and Taki, in Your Name. (2016), this chapter argues that impersonality, rather than strong individualism, enables Shinkai’s characters to become heroes in the sekai-kei genre. Shintoism and classical Japanese language constitute the key elements in Shinkai’s concept of impersonality, or the state of an individual character in which they empty themselves to become a medium for others’ agencies and voices.”
2022
Furuhata, Yuriko. Weathering with You: Mythical time and the paradox of the anthropocene. Representations, 157(1), 68-89.
“This article focuses on the animated Japanese film Weathering with You (2019) in order to think critically about the limits and merits of site-specific, local approaches to the anthropogenic climate crisis, and to the Anthropocene and its mythopoetic tendency. While the geological period of the Anthropocene is thoroughly historical and rooted in the modern scientific paradigm of Earth history, the mythologizing tendency in search of new cosmologies within the discourse of the Anthropocene complicates this linear trajectory of time. Anthropocene discourse invites its critics to revive and reinvent local myths. When these myths appear within the planetary scale of Anthropocene discourse, they take on a cosmological, if not universal, outlook. It is this spatial and temporal paradox of myths within the geological framework of the Anthropocene that this article investigates through the mediation of Weathering with You.”
2021
Cheng, Cathering Ju-Yu. Catastrophism and creation in Shinkai Makoto’s Your Name.
In Joff P. N. Bradley & Catherine Ju-Yu Cheng (eds.).Thinking with Animation (pp. 46-63). Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Jocoy, Stacey. Kagura dance: The musicality of ritualized dance as historical imaginary in Kimetsu no Yaiba and Kimi no Na wa. Transcommunication, 8(2), 192-202.
Karatsu, Rie. Rewriting 3.11 and feminization of the countryside: National discourse in Shinkai Makoto’s Your Name (2016). Japanese Studies, 41(3), 273-284.
“This study analyzes national discourses on the representation of the countryside and gender in Makoto Shinkai’s anime, Your Name (2016), a fictional response to larger national policies and an imaginary resolution of post-disaster anxieties that invokes the horrors of the Great East Japan Disaster on 11 March 2011. The first section examines and contextualizes post-disaster anxieties and fears in Your Name (2016), highlighting the way in which the film espouses the national policies on recovery efforts and regional revitalization that are integrally linked to discourses on the revival of essentialist notions of Japan’s traditions and culture. The second section illustrates how these discourses are interrelated with the gendered symbolism attached to the countryside, the savior narrative structure, and memory loss motifs in the film. The results of this investigation suggest that the film’s discourses reinforce the pervasive political structure that places the interests of Tokyo above other regions and legitimatizes this structure in combination with that of gender subordination. This study offers a platform for discussion on the national discourses in post-disaster films as well as the role and function of the countryside and gender in representing the nation.”
Liao, Chaoyang. Time in movement: The knotting of thought in Makoto Shinkai’s Your Name.
In Joff P. N. Bradley & Catherine Ju-Yu Cheng (eds.).Thinking with Animation (pp. 25-45). Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
2020
Han, Grace. Back to front: Animating melodrama in Makoto Shinkai’s Garden of Words. Animation Journal, 15.
[Winner, Society for Animation Studies 2019 Maureen Furniss Award for Best Student Paper on Animated Media]
Tan, Matthew John Paul. Being someplace else: The theological virtues in the manga of Makoto Shinkai. Religions, 11(3), article 109.
Yoneyama, Shoko. Rethinking human-nature relationships in the time of Coronavirus: Postmodern animism in films by Miyazaki Hayao & Shinkai Makoto. The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, 18(16), article 6.
2019
Castiglioni, Andrea. From Your Name to Shin-Gojira: Spiritual criscrossing, spiritual soteriology, and catastrophic identity in contemporary Japanese visual culture.
In Fabio Rambelli (ed.). Spirit and animism in contemporary Japan: The Invisible empire (pp. 171-186). London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Thelen, Timo. Disaster and salvation in the Japanese periphery. “The rural” in Shinkai Makoto’s Kimi no na wa (Your Name). FFK Journal, 4, 215-230.
2017
Ward, Sarah. Be careful what you wish for: Makoto Shinkai’s Your Name. Metro, 193, 44-49.
2015
Gradjian, Maria. The precarious self: Melancholia and the eradication of adolescence in Makoto Shinkai’s anime works.
In Kristina Iwata-Weickgenannt & Roman Rosenbaum (eds.). Visions of precarity in Japanese popular culture and literature (pp. 117-131). Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
2014
Duke, Shaun. The multiplicities of empire and the libidinal economy in Makoto Shinkai’s The Place Promised in Our Early Days. Science Fiction Film & Television, 7(3), 387-407.
2009
Bingham, Adam. Distant voices, still lives: Love, loss, and longing in the work of Makoto Shinkai. Asian Cinema, 20(2), 217-225.
Walker, Gavin. The filmic time of coloniality: On Shinkai Makoto’s The Place Promised in Our Early Days. Mechademia: An Annual Forum for Anime, Manga, and the Fan Arts, 4, 3-18.
*** OPEN ACCESS ***
2007
Kuge, Shu. In the world that is infinitely inclusive: Four theses on Voices of a Distant Star and The Wings of Honneamise. Mechademia: An Annual Forum for Anime, Manga, and the Fan Arts, 2, 251-266.