Director Bibliography – Makoto Shinkai

This bibliography covers the scholarly publications on Makoto Shinkai and his works written in English that I am aware of.

(Updated: January 26, 2026)

2026

Okuyama, Yoshiko. Japanese religions in film.
In John C. Leyden (ed.). The Routledge companion to religions and film, second edition (pp. 287-306). Abingdon, UK: Routledge.

• “This chapter explores the intricate tapestry of Japanese religious traditions as depicted in contemporary Japanese cinema. By analyzing seven representative films, it examines how elements of Shinto, Buddhism, animism, folk religions, and indigenous Ainu spirituality are depicted in cinema. Through a semiotic approach, the chapter highlights the use of religious symbolism and narratives in films like The Burmese Harp (1945/1985), Sweet Bean (2015), and Golden Kamuy (2024). It provides a foundation for understanding the nuanced portrayals of religion in cinema, while underscoring the importance of diverse representation in portraying Japanese religious life.”

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Yoneyama, Shoko, Szorenyi, Anna, & Nursey-Bray, Melissa. Animism meets posthumanism: reimagining the human–nature relationship through shrine gates (torii) in the works of Miyazaki Hayao and Shinkai Makoto. Japan Forum (forthcoming).
*** OPEN ACCESS ***

• “How can we rethink the human-nature relationship in the Anthropocene? Posthumanist approaches offer a critique of anthropocentrism, but often implicitly appropriate spiritual approaches, and explicitly dismiss one of these – animism – as premodern, negating the theoretical possibility of exploring the human-nature relationship charged with animistic imagination. We argue that films by Miyazaki Hayao and Shinkai Makoto can work as a medium to transcend these limits of posthumanism and offer a pathway for understanding humans’ connection with nature. Specifically, the imagery of the shrine gate, positioned as a cultural reference available to a global audience, can stimulate what Lyotard calls ‘paralogy’: enabling encounters with ‘not the known, but the unknown’, thinking the ‘unthinkable’. In the films torii act as portals to realms where humans and nature are intimately connected, grounded in animistic worldview. The films offer a popular version of posthuman connectedness that allows for the paralogical mystery of spirituality.”

2025

Cheung, Sing. The girl’s body, climate, and neoliberalism in Weathering with You. Papers: Explorations into Children’s Literature, 29(1), 26-45.
*** OPEN ACCESS ***

• Set in an eternally raining Tokyo and in a time when the climate has changed permanently, the anime film Weathering with You (2019) tells the story about a teenage girl possessing the magical ability to clear the sky and bring sunshine back to a part of the city for a short period of time through prayers. This form of power is later employed by the young protagonists to run a “sunshine girl” service in the city characterised by the neoliberal market. The first half of the film gives sentimental values to the service; however, as the plot unfolds, the overuse of the magical power gradually results in the bodily sacrifice of the girl protagonist. This article makes the case that Weathering with You makes visible how girls’ bodily sacrifice is entangled with humans’ mistreatment of the environment. Engaging with ecofeminist philosophy, Stacy Alaimo’s term of trans-corporeality, and economic geography, this article argues that the film cautions against manipulation of nature and girls’ bodily labour within the ideological framework of neoliberalism. The “sunshine girl” service therefore offers a dark model that illuminates what it means to be a girl (or human) living in the Anthropocene against the backdrop of masculinist desires to master the natural world. 

Germer, Andrea. Queer carnival, gender, and Fascist moments in Shinkai Makoto’s Kimi no na wa (Your Name, 2016). The Journal of Japanese Studies, 51(1), 145-178.

• “In Japanese animation, queer characters and plots are sometimes centrally presented and they seem to destabilize and challenge heteronormative identity categories. However, in Shinkai Makoto’s sekai-kei animation Your Name (2016), the queering of bodies, time and place is “carnivalized,” i.e., made nonthreatening through comedy. With imaginaries of a world turned upside down, catastrophe, and nonlinear time the film references the crisis of the triple disaster of 2011. It answers such crisis with the melodramatic return to romantic and hierarchical gender formation, sexist imagery and “fascist moments” of cultural essentialism, that reify nativist and normative ideas about gender, nation, and culture.”

Liu, Kaiwen. A study on the cross-cultural communication of Japanese animation in China – Taking Makoto Shinkai as an example.
In Fong Peng Chew (ed.). Global Dialogue on Media Dynamics, Trends and Perspectives on Public Relations and Communication: Proceedings of the International Conference on Public Relations and Media Communication (pp. 9-13). Abingdon, UK: CRC Press.

• “After the release of the Japanese animated film Your Name. in China, director Makoto Shinkai’s popularity rose rapidly. Since then, the cross-cultural communication of his animated films in China has achieved great success, which is instructive for the cross-cultural communication of domestic animation. Through textual and content analysis, this paper analyzes the cross-cultural communication of Makoto Shinkai’s animated films in China from three aspects: uncertainty avoidance, high and low contexts, and cultural identity. Finally, the paper puts forward three targeted suggestions for the cross-cultural communication of domestic animation in the future. Specifically, domestic animation should improve its industry chain, highlight traditional Chinese culture visually and verbally, and emphasize universal values in films.”

Miyose, Colby Y. Carnivore salarymen and herbivore males: Kimi no Na wa and the shift to the omnivorous person. Popular Culture Review, 36(1), 8-16.

• “Concerns of gender equality and fluidity has been a long-standing issue in contemporary society for decades, however, recently, the pressing issue surrounding media representations of gender has come to the forefront. The rise of feminist studies over the last few decades has led to a cornucopia of research on manga and anime in relation to femininity, but fewer examine masculinity or gender fluidity. This paper will expand the study of both femininity and masculinity but will mainly focus on masculinity, in the form of the Carnivore Woman and the Herbivore Man, with an argument towards the “Omnivorous Person.” The omnivorous person can be thought of as an extension and paralleling to gender fluidity. As a highly accessible medium, through fantasy and metaphor, anime and manga have the ability to display a collective consciousness of Japanese society. To further elaborate on these new gender trends within Japanese popular media, a textual analysis of the anime film Kimi no Na wa (2016) will be used as exemplar. It is impossible to conduct any in-depth study that is truly representative of a genre, especially considering the magnitude and vastness of manga and anime, however, selecting a text that is “popular” can suppose some degree of cultural relevance.”

Poon, Erica Ka-yan. Reaffirming Japanese identity through the multiverse: A response to post-3.11 uncertainties from Your Name.
In Paul Booth (ed.). Entering the multiverse: Perspectives on alternate universes and parallel worlds (pp. 279-289). New York: Routledge.

• “Current scholarship about the multiverse in films focuses on Hollywood cinema, particularly superhero movies such as the Marvel Universe and Spiderverse. This book chapter proposes a non-Western approach to studying the multiverse of Japanese animation, using Your Name (Makoto Shinkai, 2016) as a critical example. This chapter examines how Your Name approaches the multiverse through Japanese traditional culture. It also analyzes how the film deals with the trauma of the Earthquake through a narrative of the multiverse. The Japanese identity is in crisis after the disaster, represented by Taki and Mitsuha’s obliteration of each other’s names. The book chapter argues that Your Name confirms the Japanese identity by reassuring the traditions of Japanese culture, which makes a connection beyond time and space possible. Although the multiverse may offer alternative realities and potential diversity, the multiverse can also be limiting. In this film, the multiverse reinforces Japan’s national discourse of unity to resolve post-3.11 anxiety”

Zhong, Jianzhi. Exploring urban resilience through Makoto Shinkai’s ‘Disaster Trilogy’. Japanese Studies, 45(2), 189-209.

• “Makoto Shinkai’s animation ‘Disaster Trilogy’ – comprising Your Name, Weathering with You, and Suzume – has gained global recognition for its exploration of natural disasters and their societal impacts. This study examines how the film trilogy reflects evolving paradigms of urban resilience and disaster management. By utilizing observational analysis, critical textual analysis, and hermeneutics, the paper investigates the films’ depictions of natural hazards, societal responses, and the broader cultural context in which they were produced. The trilogy demonstrates a shift from a technocentric approach to a more holistic understanding of urban resilience that embraces concepts of the Anthropocene and postmodern animism. It critiques Western-centric views and highlights the importance of inclusivity, adaptability, and the voices of marginalized groups and regions. Through Shinkai’s works, this article contributes to the discourse on resilient cities, and suggests that effective urban resilience strategies must consider the interplay of cultural narratives, social structures, and environmental challenges, thus moving the academy towards a more inclusive and adaptive approach that values the experiences and contributions of diverse communities.”

2024

Grajdian, Maria Mihaela. Authorship in music and sound design / 5: Tenmon and his music for Makoto Shinkai’s films.
In Marco Pellitteri (ed.). The Palgrave Handbook of Music and Sound in Japanese Animation (pp. 439-452). Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan Singapore.

• “This chapter is a deep cultural and musical analysis of an anomalous score composer: Tenmon (pseud. of Atsushi Shirakawa). It discusses this creator from his rise in tandem with anime director Makoto Shinkai in the late 1990s to an even more astonishing—and sudden—disappearance after the duo’s final collaboration in Hoshi o ou kodomo (2011). Tenmon’s unique approach to musical composition and its relation to animation both validate the medium’s universality and challenge the premises of the Japanese social status quo. And, perhaps most importantly, the chapter reflects on the inconspicuous heaviness of Tenmon’s legacy, which, despite its pointedly limited time frame and the concentration of its revolutionary elements, makes it possible for future composers, in Japan as well as elsewhere, to organically develop new stylistic languages, directions, strategies based on Tenmon’s incipient contribution and without turning into his epigons.”

Li, Zhizi. Disasters and gender in Japanese anime films: Makoto Shinkai’s Your Name and Weathering with You. Disaster Prevention and Management, 33(4), 335-352.

2023

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.”

Santos, Thátilla Sousa & Satler, Lara Lima. (Re)learn to walk: The melodramatic narrative strategy in Garden of Words. Intercom: Revista Brasileira de Ciências da Comunicação, 46.

• “This article analyzes the development of the character Yukari Yukino in the anime Garden of Words (2013), to present how audiovisual productions that are not part of the melodrama genre use its narrative strategies in the dramatic construction of the works. Therefore, bibliographical research about melodrama was accomplished, and film analysis of excerpts from the animation to identify this resource in the conception of the protagonist’s story. As a result, the analysis indicated how a Western concept (melodrama) can be used in a Japanese animation, contributing to the sentimental charge of the narrative, and facilitating its access, considering that it is spread around the world in different media, such as cinema and streaming platforms.”

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.”

Gómez Pérez, Francisco Javier, Pérez Rufi, Jose Patricio, & Valverde-Maester, Águeda María. Makoto Shinkai: Japanese animation cinema and construction of dimensional characters. Fonseca, Journal of Communication, 25, 165-179

Teng, Tim Shao-Hung. Time, disaster, new media: Your Name as a mind-game film. New Review of Film and Television Studies, 20(4), 459-488.

• “This essay argues that by deploying the mind-game tropes of body swap and time travel, the Japanese animated film Your Name poses questions of time, memory, and mediation that must be considered in light of the 2011 national disaster. To take up these questions, I juxtapose three lines of interrogation that situate the film at varying timescales. The first analyzes the film’s use of myth to construct a unified timeline that ensures the continuation of national history. This national time, however, is warped into a cosmic scheme. Expounding on the trope of musubi or weaving, the second, mind-game inquiry thus philosophizes time beyond the national framework to better account for the protagonists’ task of historical rescue through radical experiments with fate and contingency. Inspired by the film’s portrayal of skies and clouds, the final inquiry foregrounds the naturalized environment of new media technologies that engages time and memory beyond and beneath the human perceptual frame. To conclude, I provide some critical notes that ask how an ecologically attuned mind-game paradigm anticipates alternative modes of social imagination.”

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.

• “This work explores the ways in which the anime of Makoto Shinkai cinematically portrays the theological virtues of faith, hope and love. The article will explore each virtue individually, with specific reference to the work of Josef Pieper and Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. In addition, it will juxtapose their explorations of these virtues with samples of Shinkai’s corpus of films. It will assert that the consistency of Shinkai’s work reveals several important parallels with the theological virtues. Faith is the encounter between one and another that reveals one’s nature. Hope is revealed by the distance between one and another, and is realised in traversing that distance to achieve an ecstatic reunion. Love, as the erotic attraction between one and another, is the driver that also sustains the journey and closes the distance. In spite of the similarities, important differences between the cinematic and theological will be highlighted.”

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.

• “Issues we are confronted with in the age of the Anthropocene, such as climate change, extinction, and the coronavirus pandemic demand a fundamental rethink of human-nature relationships, but at the same time we are faced with a ‘crisis of imagination’, which is highlighted by the paucity of stories or narratives that enable us to fully engage with these issues. We have a ‘climate crisis’ as well as a ‘crisis of culture’ and both derive from the same source: epistemological limitations in the paradigm of modernity. The most problematic limitation is the fact that our social scientific knowledge has blind spots when it comes to nature and spirituality which makes it almost impossible for us to rethink human-nature relationships in a meaningful way. Miyazaki Hayao and Shinkai Makoto, however, directly illuminate these blind spots by making nature and spirituality central features in their animation films. This opens up new epistemological and ontological spaces in the hearts and minds of a global audience, making it possible to imagine something new. And that ‘something new’ is ‘postmodern animism’ which emerged from the fusion of a critique of modernity with the intangible cultural heritage of grassroots Japan. Postmodern animism is a philosophy that sees nature as a combination of the life-world and the spiritual-world thus enabling us to engage with climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic in a radically different way. It helps us to conceive a new paradigm that is more suitable for the Anthropocene.“

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.

• “The inseparable linkage between a communal public imagination that is shaped by the popular culture it produces is well known. For instance, when Fritz Lang’s expressionistic film Metropolis was released in 1927, its futuristic machines and robotic figures were connected with the angst of the proletariat in the popular imagination. Arguably, the existence and depiction of the precariat is one of the mainstays of graphic art in general, since the medium was traditionally referred to as a kind of plebeian art in opposition to what was perceived as high-culture fine art. In this sense manga manifested a counter-cultural discourse that pitted the middle and lower classes and their self-directed representation against the hegemony of upper-class representation. The graphic representation of the social withdrawal phenomenon hikikomori in Welcome to the Nihon hoso kyokai (NHK) depicts the burlesque sense of precarity in contemporary Japanese youth culture.”

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.