"This world is not for the ordinary!" says an elderly character in Makoto Shinkai’s latest anime. And ‘ordinary’ is the last word you would apply to a rich and spectacular fantasy that combines the Your Name director’s trademark photorealism with the sort of whimsical shape-shifting and elaborate alternate-world building that Hayao Miyazaki – the legendary auteur and Studio Ghibli co-founder to whom Shinkai is often compared – so memorably made his own.
As imaginative as they were, 2016’s Your Name and its 2019 follow-up Weathering with You featured dramatic devices (body-swapping, weather manipulation) that would work just as well in a physical sphere. (A live-action version of the former is indeed inching towards production, with Carlos López Estrada down to direct under J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot banner.)
