A Theory of Urban Space in Makoto Shinkai’s Films

ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!

Last year I visited Shinjuku Gyoen, the park in Tokyo’s busy Shinjuku district. It happened to be raining, making it hard not to think of scenes from Makoto Shinkai’s The Garden of Words (2013). The exquisite landscaping depicted in the film, with its blend of Japanese and Western styles, actually occupies only about the northern third of the park, yet most visitors congregate there. The little pavilion featured in the film, in particular, was surrounded by tourists, giving it an atmosphere utterly unlike its animated counterpart. What struck me still more was how precisely The Garden of Words emphasizes the high-rise landmarks surrounding Shinjuku Gyoen. Seen from the place where the story unfolds, the NTT DOCOMO Yoyogi Building, which resembles New York’s Empire State Building, looms oppressively just a few hundred meters away. Elegant garden planting on one side, towering modernist buildings on the other: this sharp contrast is more likely than the park scenery alone to leave the vivid impression of having stepped into a dream. The pairing of Shinjuku Gyoen and the Yoyogi Building in The Garden of Words is hardly the only scene in Shinkai’s films to derive such a strong sense of spatial contrast from disparate elements. In Weathering with You (2019), for instance, the scene in which Keisuke Suga plays with his daughter shows the open urban green space of Shiba Park in Minato Ward, with its clear view of the red-and-white Tokyo Tower. Such representations bring out the thematic importance of space in Shinkai’s work.

Sergei Eisenstein once defined animation as “a direct manifestation of the method of animism”: animation can show humans, animals, and even inorganic objects changing shape, stretching, breaking apart, and recombining, seemingly endowing them with an autonomous vitality.¹ Yet the reverse of this ontological proposition is that the stable spatial backgrounds “behind” these continually transforming objects also occupy a marginal position within animation as a form. They are inert presences that serve only narrative continuity, and could just as well be dispensed with. In other words, they are “non-animational” presences within animation. In recent years, however, leaps in digital compositing—the production stage traditionally called “photography” in animation—have opened up opportunities for the industry to explore spatial themes more deeply. Increasingly sophisticated postproduction makes it possible to give expressive depth to relatively fixed backgrounds through subtle, dynamic shifts in light, shadow, and color, breaking through animation’s inherent tendency toward flatness. This has become a major area of expressive innovation in Japanese animation today. Two television series broadcast in 2026, Botan Kamiina Fully Blossoms When Drunk (2026) and Chainsmoker Cat (2026), both mark this technological advance. Episodes 5 and 11 of the former offer unprecedentedly accomplished depictions of complex lighting, architectural materials, and even the physical textures of electronic art installations in gentrified commercial spaces. They bring space and setting to the forefront of animated staging, while once again demonstrating the technological convergence of animation and “live-action cinema.”

Shinkai has undoubtedly been an active pioneer of this advance. From Voices of a Distant Star in 2003 onward,² he has devoted little effort to refining his relatively rough character animation, concentrating instead on postproduction compositing techniques such as filters and lighting effects to create a richly detailed, luminous sense of space. This achieved what has been called “the foregrounding of the landscape’s shimmer,” bringing background space from animation’s margins to the forefront of its expressive work.³ Urban space, moreover, runs through almost his entire output as an enduring theme. As his creative ideas and production techniques have matured, this theme has found increasingly complete expression in his more recent films. The Garden of Words and Weathering with You set their stories entirely in Tokyo, giving these works an increasingly pronounced polyphonic character. On the one hand, the signature stories of youthful romance advance; on the other, the city’s manifold spaces unfold layer by layer as the stories deepen. Unlike most romantic-comedy anime, Shinkai’s films do not use space merely as a backdrop to the plot. It often becomes an active participant, generating crises and driving the story forward.

Released in 2019, Weathering with You most clearly exemplifies the distinctive approach Shinkai has built around the representation of urban space. Following a standard sekai-kei structure,⁴ it links Hodaka and Hina’s romance to a climate crisis capable of submerging Tokyo. A “hybrid” of skyline, streets and alleys, coastline, atmosphere, and networks of civil society continually responds to and steers changes in the characters’ relationships. At the story’s climax, Hodaka must choose between the city and Hina. Up to this point, the structure of Weathering with You seems to invert that of Shinkai’s previous film, Your Name (2016): in Your Name, Taki saves Mitsuha by saving the village; in Weathering with You, saving the city would require sacrificing Hina. Hodaka chooses to save Hina rather than the city, which is consequently submerged beneath unending rain. What follows, however, is the strangest and most singular turn in all of Shinkai’s films. Returning to Tokyo two years later, Hodaka discovers that the city he abandoned has stubbornly survived. Tokyo has adapted to the encroaching sea brought on by climate change and become prosperous again. Weathering with You seems to sacrifice the city, then take that sacrifice back. A similar theme is replayed and reconfigured in Suzume (2022), but this time Suzume unhesitatingly chooses the city over her beloved. Beginning with Your Name, then, Shinkai has used a succession of experiments in plotting to keep rearranging the classic sekai-kei structure, setting the city either against or alongside the characters’ relationships. He stages the choice repeatedly without granting its two sides equal standing: relative to the characters’ relationships, the existence of the city—or urban space—is absolutely nonnegotiable.

This imbalance points to the special status of urban space in Shinkai’s work. It does not simply provide a stage for the narrative; it has a more entangled connection to it that remains to be identified. The same connection appears in the 2013 theatrical film The Garden of Words. It is worth noting that this was Shinkai’s first work after his much-criticized first animated feature, Children Who Chase Lost Voices (2011).⁵ Compared with that film, The Garden of Words is shorter, returns to Shinkai’s comfort zone, and takes up again the youthful romance at which he is more adept. It can be seen as a retreat to familiar creative habits after the failure of his first attempt at big-screen animation, as well as a fresh start leading toward his subsequent commercial success—a work that distinctly links what came before with what followed. At the same time, it is one of the relatively few wholly realist works in his output to date. Its position is thus quite singular, making it an important point of entry for a deeper discussion of his filmmaking.

As noted above, the varied scenery of Shinjuku Gyoen is central to The Garden of Words. In the film, the elegant landscape composed of artfully arranged Asian shrubs, wooden arched bridges, stone lanterns, and pavilions becomes associated with the classical Japanese spirituality conveyed by waka, or classical Japanese verse. Yet the carefully trimmed lawns and open vistas still reveal a Western framework underlying the garden’s design. Like many large urban green spaces in the Tokyo metropolitan area, Shinjuku Gyoen originated in the sweeping modernization of Tokyo’s built environment during the Meiji period. This transformation went beyond the introduction of modern technologies and material facilities: it also involved establishing the concept of urban planning and redefining the functions of space. Nineteenth-century European planning thought, the point of departure for Japanese urban modernity, had already developed the idea of urban green space extensively. In the early nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution brought rapid urbanization, and European cities increasingly became crowded spaces of heterogeneous populations. Industrial pollution, appalling sanitation, inadequate public facilities, and fierce class antagonisms made them ever more turbulent and repellent. European socialist thought at the time was directed less toward the worsening class divisions under capitalist production than toward the rapid deterioration of urban environments. In response to these ills, the French socialist pioneer Charles Fourier conceived a compact form of urban organization: housing, industrial production, and public facilities would occupy separate sections, linked by galleries, of a single quadrangular building complex. A belt of farmland would surround it, separating it from neighboring cities to prevent overcrowding. The Englishman Ebenezer Howard continued and developed Fourier’s plan. Like Fourier’s scheme, Howard’s “garden city” would restrict urban expansion through a permanent agricultural greenbelt around the city. It went further, however, by bringing parks and green space into the city’s spatial core to improve its internal environment.

Today, the “garden city” has become a fairly conventional planning idea. What contemporary planners often overlook, however, is that nineteenth-century urban utopias sought not merely to improve filthy, chaotic urban environments in physical terms. They also hoped to regulate inhabitants’ behavior by combining deliberate spatial design with social arrangements. This thinking rested on a chain of assumptions: urban space should not be a creation through which human needs are projected onto the material world in one direction only; it should also act back upon inhabitants’ inner lives. Well-behaved modern individuals therefore required well-designed urban spaces. Neither kind of order would emerge spontaneously; both depended on rational planning. Such work was at once social and material engineering. Put more politically, nineteenth-century urban utopians intended to use this dual engineering rationally to avert the upheavals inherent in modern society and achieve “socialism without revolution.” As Jane Jacobs, a critic of urban utopianism, pointed out, the essence of the “garden city” idea was to maintain a static, paternalistic environment, one that welcomed neither change nor anything outside the utopian plan.⁶

At the Meiji-era inception of Japanese urban modernization, however, urban utopianism was indeed an enormously influential avant-garde idea. The concept of urban green space embedded in European utopian plans entered Japan along with it. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the new regime established through the Boshin War defined itself as the chief agent of modernizing the state and its people, and the principal force for instilling rationality in society. It embraced the urban parks that had already appeared in Europe on the simple, direct grounds that “civilized people must engage in civilized activities in civilized spaces.” Ueno Park, in northeastern Tokyo, exemplifies how this Western institution was woven into Japan’s state-led modernization agenda. After the Restoration government’s forces defeated the shogunate and took over Edo Castle, most of the land where Ueno Park now stands was designated state property. On the advice of the Dutch physician Antonius Bauduin, Ueno became one of Tokyo’s first five parks designated by the Grand Council of State in 1873. Compared with other urban parks established in the Meiji period, Ueno housed an exceptional number of public cultural institutions, successively accommodating museums, a library, a zoo, the Japan Academy, the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, and the Tokyo Music School. It also served as a venue for public ceremonies of state. Emperor Meiji visited in successive years, 1876 and 1877, to attend the park’s opening ceremony and the National Industrial Exhibition. These visits asserted state sovereignty over a new kind of public space while presenting this imported institution, still unfamiliar to Japanese society, as a gift to the people. At a time when the Restoration regime’s survival remained uncertain, they thus offered an initial draft of a social contract, highlighting how state action shaped civil society in countries that modernized later.⁷ Within this urban park, ancient artifacts and animals from distant places were brought under scientific management and exhibited to the public, extending the state’s narrative of legitimacy across both time and space. Even Seiyoken, the Western-style restaurant that opened there when the park was first established, was absorbed into a narrative of progress through nutritional modernization. Perhaps the space opened up by Ueno Park had itself long since been organized as part of that narrative.

Unlike Ueno Park, Shinjuku Gyoen became imperial property in 1879 and was never open to the public before the war. In the early twentieth century, the government hired a British designer to turn it into a Western-style garden for imperial activities.⁸ By then, its internal landscape already resembled what we see today. This did not mean it was cut off from society: the imperial family still used the gardens for elite social gatherings and state ceremonies. Most notably, Emperor Taisho’s state funeral was held there in 1927. After the Second World War, the government repaired the damage the garden had suffered and opened it to the public. Horticultural events previously held there also became public occasions. With the property development around the park during the 1970s and 1980s, Shinjuku Gyoen, at the heart of the city, gradually acquired its setting amid modern high-rises. In 1989, it again attracted international attention when Japanese political leaders and representatives of numerous countries attended Emperor Showa’s funeral there. Despite immense changes in its social functions, Shinjuku Gyoen, like Ueno Park, retained close ties to the state as part of Tokyo’s network of urban parks and green spaces. This reinforced its multiple forms of hybridity: tradition and modernity, state and people, nature and artifice.

Beneath the surface of its youthful romance, The Garden of Words preserves a visual representation of these various forms of hybridity. Or rather, it is precisely by constructing a romantic plot that the film explores every layer of the hybridity formed around Shinjuku Gyoen. It stages a scandalous teacher–student romance. While wandering through the park, the protagonist, Akizuki, happens to meet Yukino, a teacher at his high school, and develops a romantic relationship with her without knowing that she teaches at his school. At bottom, theirs remains an illicit teacher–student romance. Without this misunderstanding, audiences would probably find the relationship difficult to accept. Such ethical ambiguity is a familiar feature of Shinkai’s animation: he is very good at packaging “improper” romantic situations for a mass audience. Indeed, these “improper” situations themselves belong to one of his recurring themes—the possibility of establishing impossible relationships. In the early Voices of a Distant Star and The Place Promised in Our Early Days (2004), physical or social space creates the barriers that make a relationship impossible. In the subsequent 5 Centimeters per Second, spatial distance persists, but what becomes truly difficult to overcome is the divergence of their paths through life and the emotional barriers between them. By The Garden of Words, impossibility arises from differences in status. Space—or, more precisely, Shinjuku Gyoen—now becomes a positive condition for crossing those barriers and forming a relationship. Washed by the station crowds, the school’s sharply stratified community of teachers and students dissolves into solitary individuals wandering the city. Just as Tokyo’s urban park system had required from its inception, Shinjuku Gyoen receives Akizuki and Yukino as equal citizens within civil society, stripped of particular status and with their personal histories effaced. Only on this basis can the two move beyond the restrictions of status and develop a further relationship. The misunderstanding about their identities is therefore not a convenient plot contrivance: the space of Shinjuku Gyoen structurally provides for it. By quoting waka, Yukino casts the signs of summer in Shinjuku Gyoen as an ancient sensibility unfolding and reappearing, through the Japanese language, in contemporary urban space. Far from setting the park and their relationship apart, this association reinforces the homogeneous universality of citizenship through a national historical myth. Shinkai may not consciously be invoking the history of urban parks, yet he still accurately represents the function Tokyo’s park planners assigned to this space a century earlier. This shows that the original function of urban parks has outlasted the political transformations of the twentieth century, remaining stubbornly inscribed in their materiality as a cultural stratum capable of shaping the social ecology of contemporary Japan. As a chronicler of contemporary urban history, Shinkai has faithfully captured this.

It is precisely this constitutive role in the characters’ relationships that makes Shinjuku Gyoen in Shinkai’s animation comparable to what Thomas Lamarre calls “infrastructure.” In the narrow sense, Lamarre uses the concept to refer to broadcasting and internet services—the material basis of media. These media infrastructures connect to individuals, fill the gaps in everyday life, and orchestrate bodily experiences, bringing them onto platforms where they can resonate.⁹ In The Garden of Words, Shinjuku Gyoen likewise creates the conditions for the characters’ relationship by functioning as a kind of medium. On entering the park, the characters automatically shed the outward attributes of their social positions and are drawn to one another through their inner lives. We can therefore say that, as represented in Shinkai’s work, Tokyo’s urban space has already been “virtualized.” Before it performs specific physical functions as material infrastructure, it already acts as psychological and cultural infrastructure: it gives individuals a homogeneous, blank social identity, lets them wander through public space, and summons purely inward passions to fill their own emptiness.

Media as infrastructure continually encode, transmit, receive, and decode information-bearing radio waves, thereby achieving a technological occupation of the “ether.” Urban space as infrastructure likewise represents a technological expansion into natural objects, necessarily requiring human labor and reason to penetrate, envelop, and reorganize space, landscape, and environment. The Garden of Words presents Shinjuku Gyoen as an ecological enclave set apart from the concrete jungle, yet also emphasizes the spectacle of the park surrounded by high-rises, exposing the fact that this ecological landscape has already been technologically mediated. To some extent, contemporary buildings that extend vertically continue the nineteenth-century utopian urban vision: extracting more floor space from less land, making human activity less dependent on the weather, and freeing more land for ecological restoration. The realization of this ideal rests entirely on twentieth-century advances in civil engineering, accumulated experience in breeding crops and trees, and complex designs for urban utility and road networks. What The Garden of Words depicts is never a fragment of nature within the city, but a naturalized technological system. The characters’ relationship develops on the basis of the technical reorganization of urban landscapes—and even of behavior and social relations—yet it also depends on forgetting that technical basis and invoking national myth. The film’s repeated aerial views of Shinjuku Gyoen, however, disrupt this naturalization of the landscape by placing the viewpoint in locations not provided by nature: aboard aircraft or atop high-rise buildings. We can thus say that Shinkai’s fetishistic depictions of the city bring out the ambiguous hybridity of contemporary urban space, fully displaying its character as what Bruno Latour calls a “hybrid.”

The representation of urban space as technologically constituted is no accident in Shinkai’s work. His debut, Voices of a Distant Star, is regarded as one of the founding works of the sekai-kei narrative model. It is also a science-fiction animation incorporating elements of space opera. Yet the first technological element Shinkai introduces into this science-fiction work is neither spaceships, aliens, nor giant robots, but digital radio communication—in other words, a medium. “The world is wherever a mobile-phone signal can reach”: this line gives Shinkai’s entire sequence of sekai-kei works a strongly technological foundation.¹⁰ From the outset, the “world” is a highly technologically mediated place. Its extent depends on the furthest reach of technological infrastructure, while the characters’ relationships, bound to the world’s continued existence, depend on whether that infrastructure can connect them smoothly. The rich variations of sekai-kei stories unfold through changing alignments and misalignments between infrastructural reach and emotional communion. In Voices of a Distant Star, Shinkai takes particular care not to present radio communication, or media, as instantaneous action at a distance. Instead, he emphasizes the physical propagation of radio signals through space. Through this physical mechanism, spatial distance becomes a linear narrative unfolding in time, bringing the existence of that distance to the fore. In other words, Shinkai narrativizes space by spatializing technology. Similarly, in the first part of 5 Centimeters per Second (2007), Takaki’s rail journey across the distance between Tokyo and Tochigi and back forms the principal narrative thread. Technological infrastructure in Shinkai’s work thus always corresponds to and marks out a particular physical extent. This produces what are called shifts in scale in his films. Such shifts are not merely a passive reflection of the contemporary technological environment, as in Tim Shao-Hung Teng’s analysis. They are also Shinkai’s active attempts to build narrative possibilities on that environment. Far from marginalizing human beings, technology becomes a testing ground for constructing human relationships.¹¹ His early Voices of a Distant Star and The Place Promised in Our Early Days, along with Children Who Chase Lost Voices, all focus on radio technology, locating the “world” that infrastructure can open up on a cosmic scale. The Garden of Words, by contrast, narrows that range to the mere sixty hectares of Shinjuku Gyoen. The work that connects these two radically different scales is 5 Centimeters per Second, which condenses all the elements of technological infrastructure found across Shinkai’s films. By depicting the characters’ movements across Japan through infrastructure, it tests all the possibilities that rail and air routes, postal services, radio communications, and other infrastructures can offer their relationships. At the film’s climax, a rocket rises from the Tanegashima launch site, sending a deep-space probe toward distant outer space and successfully extending technological infrastructure’s reach to a cosmic scale once again. In the scenes that follow, the viewpoint tracks a bird in flight, bringing the image back from the remote immensity of space to Tokyo’s urban space. Multiple spatial scales are thus deployed within a continuous hybrid of cosmos, ecology, and technological infrastructure, providing a measure of the emotional distance between the characters.

In Weathering with You, Tokyo’s urban space is once again connected to astronomical and atmospheric phenomena. This time, however, the relentless rain no longer appears as a technological event subject to human intervention. It acts on the city as infrastructure from a transcendent outside. Shinkai’s three most recent animated films have sought to address the psychological trauma that the earthquake of March 11, 2011, inflicted on Japanese society. The introduction of transcendent astronomical and geological events reflects this change in his creative thinking. Human-made infrastructure is no longer treated as the sole, indestructible condition for constructing the characters’ relationships; its potential material fragility receives extensive attention. Although the nature of these transcendent disasters is repeatedly redefined from film to film, and the connection between urban space and the characters’ relationships continually rearranged, Shinkai always lets the city emerge from crisis. At the end of Weathering with You, Tokyo’s inhabitants accept the permanence of climatic and geological change, while human technology that accommodates climate change successfully rebuilds the city’s infrastructure. This brings Shinkai’s work into a long thematic tradition in Japanese animation concerned with “technological survival.” The theme abandons the anthropocentric perspective of technology conquering nature and turns instead to how human beings can survive through technology in an ever-changing environment. “Technological survival” enters the domain of hybrids, denying both the omnipotence of technology and the harmony and inviolability of nature. Humanity must seek survival in a relationship with nature marked by perpetual tension and friction. The hybrid spaces technology creates, themselves fraught with danger, are its only means of finding a way to live.

Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) is a foundational exploration of technological survival in animation. Contrary to the familiar ecological readings of the film, Miyazaki’s manga version of the story reveals that the biosphere inhabited by its protagonist, Nausicaä—even its present-day human beings—contains not the slightest natural element. All of it consists of biotechnological products created by an earlier humanity. Yet it is precisely thanks to technological intervention that the entire biosphere has survived a nuclear apocalypse. At the end of the story, Nausicaä rejects the return of that earlier humanity, choosing to let this thoroughly technologically mediated, post-apocalyptic world continue to exist. Survival is her answer to the ethical question of technology. Nausicaä profoundly influenced Hideaki Anno, who worked on its production and carried many of its elements into his own Evangelion series, including the theme of technological survival. In the final installment of the Rebuild of Evangelion film series, released in 2021, Anno restrains his urge to display industrial spectacle. Instead, he devotes an extended sequence to a detailed depiction of a settlement of survivors maintaining a small habitable area within a post-apocalyptic disaster environment. Although the settlement adheres to the simplest agrarian way of life, it still requires cutting-edge technology to keep the harmful, divinely charged environment covering the earth’s surface at bay. It is, in effect, another version of Nausicaä’s post-apocalyptic imaginary. In Weathering with You, Shinkai, a leading representative of a new generation of internationally influential animation directors, continues the theme of technological survival pioneered by Miyazaki while giving it richer layers. Unlike Miyazaki and Anno, whose treatments of the theme are imbued with a sense of crisis and even pessimism, Shinkai has absolute confidence in the actual cities contemporary people inhabit. He believes they possess the wisdom to overcome crisis.

Shinkai’s optimism derives in part from his intense urban fetishism. Weathering with You is packed with astonishing details from the real city, vividly conveying the noisy, chaotic atmosphere of urban space. As both 5 Centimeters per Second and Weathering with You show, this hybrid infrastructural space breaks down the ties between people, but also creates the conditions for individuals stripped of those ties to make an inward connection. In this sense, The Garden of Words and Weathering with You are photographic negatives of 5 Centimeters per Second. If the city allows people to pass one another by, as in the latter film, it also allows them to meet by chance, as in the other two. Together, these two aspects constitute what Hiroki Azuma calls “misdelivery.” Shinkai is not concerned with giving a definite answer about what relationships the city might bring into being. He cares more about keeping that question unresolved; for unimaginable relationships that cross established limits, this effectively guarantees that their possibility remains open. And in a sekai-kei work, a large-scale material crisis amounts to a metaphor for a crisis in human relationships. The city in Weathering with You, capable of connecting people inwardly and overcoming emotional and psychological crises, must therefore also be capable of overcoming a material crisis.

Criticism of sekai-kei stories has repeatedly pointed to their lack of a concept of society mediating between the individual and the world, defining that absence as the form’s essential characteristic. Yet Shinkai’s recent sekai-kei works attempt to move beyond this framework. Both Weathering with You and Suzume deliberately extend person-to-person connections made possible by infrastructure into broad networks of collective relations. In doing so, they seek to revive the concept of “society” within such works and reconstruct the story’s “middle ground.” This attempt also risks stripping the stories of sekai-kei’s literary imagination and reducing them to a simple affirmation of existing social and material reality—above all, metropolitan life in Tokyo. This tendency in Shinkai’s recent work raises again the question we encountered earlier: why, in Weathering with You and Suzume, is the city ultimately saved, no matter what exchange the plot sets up between it and the characters, and no matter how the protagonist chooses between them? The answer may be that, for a director whose enduring theme is the connection between urban infrastructure and human relationships, the city’s collapse would make it impossible to construct the patterns of relationship he knows and favors. Even “storytelling” itself would risk coming to an end along with it. Simply to sustain the imaginative possibility of the stories themselves, the city’s destruction must remain unimaginable.

In other words, we should pass a harsher judgment on Shinkai’s recent films. Their absolute confidence in the possibilities of social relationships does not derive from his confidence in the material solidity of urban infrastructure and the possibilities of technology. The causality runs the other way: his firm conviction that the city must overcome disaster and continue surviving through technology derives from his complete inability to imagine social transformation. Shinkai cannot imagine fundamental changes in urban life and modes of interaction—in the “everyday” and the tacit social “atmosphere” pervading Japanese society. This excessively optimistic, even evasive attitude also keeps his exploration of technology superficial. He all too readily stops questioning technology’s effectiveness and infrastructure’s solidity, shifting the plot’s center of gravity toward the dramatic unfolding of human relationships and offering only an unconditional affirmation of technological infrastructure. Compared with animation directors active in the twentieth century, such as Miyazaki, Anno, and Katsuhiro Otomo, Shinkai’s attitude displays a particularly marked lack of critical force. Just recently, Shinkai announced that he would release a new animated film in theaters in 2026. Reportedly, it will depict relationships among a wider range of people while returning to the space-based science fiction he tried in Voices of a Distant Star. This choice of subject suggests that a director whose themes and selection of elements show such strong continuity has exhausted his visual and narrative explorations of the city and is preparing to step away and try new combinations.

Beyond Shinkai’s own films, however, the technical and expressive possibilities he has opened up will continue to stimulate animation production in the foreseeable years ahead, generating richer representations of urban space. We are bound to see more works that put the city at the forefront of their staging. Japan’s urban landscapes have also changed considerably since Shinkai’s debut as an animation director. The appearance of gentrified commercial spaces and public places has gradually changed as neoliberalization has deepened. The changing textures of urban landscapes in Shinkai’s animation reflect not only advances in animation technology: they also faithfully record changes in the places depicted. Future animation will have the opportunity to carry this documentary quality forward.