Distant Voices, Still Lives: Love, Loss, and Longing in the work of Makoto Shinkai

Abstract

Within the hallowed ranks of Japanese anime, the label of “new Miyazaki” is something that is at once both too difficult and too easy to bestow on new directors: too difficult because the Studio Ghibli luminary is as distinctive a figure as is currently working in Japanese cinema; too easy as a great deal of our current Anglophone critical establishment seems only able to valorize promising new directors by relying on lazy comparisons to great filmmakers of past generations. Discourse on Kitano Takeshi in particular exemplifies this trend. By the time of his own international breakthrough with Hana-Bi in 1997, he was being variously compared to Ozu, Kurosawa, and Oshima in Japan; elsewhere to Martin Scorsese, Buster Keaton, Jean-Pierre Melville, Robert Bresson, John Woo, Sam Peckinpah, and Quentin Tarantino.