Suddenly, I felt surrounded in my daily life by disaster.

“As I continued to make the plot, this idea of disaster kept creeping in. I wanted to tell a love story, a romance, a coming-of-age of an adolescent girl,” Shinkai said on a recent trip to New York, speaking through an interpreter. “With these three films, I didn’t set out to make a disaster movie. Suzume, whose mother perished in the tsunami, years later meets a mysterious young man responsible for racing to close portals - literal doorways that appear around Japan - before they unleash a giant, earthquake-causing worm. Suzume, which opens in US theatres on Friday (Apr 14), returns to the earthquake of 2011. In Weathering With You, a runaway teenage boy befriends a Tokyo girl who can control the weather, spawning fluctuations that mirror climate change.

In Your Name, a meteor threatens to demolish a village, an event that dovetails with a body-switching romance. The three blockbusters that have followed by Shinkai - Your Name, Weathering With You and the new release Suzume - have each tethered hugely emotional tales to ecological disaster. I began to think about how I wanted to tell stories within this new reality.”

“I had this odd, foreboding feeling that that could happen again and again.

“The shock to me was that the daily life that we had become accustomed to in Japan can suddenly be severed without any warning whatsoever,” says Shinkai. When the tsunami and quake ravaged the Tōhoku region of northern Japan and prompted a nuclear meltdown, Shinkai, a now 50-year-old director and animator of some of the most popular anime features in the world, could feel his sense of storytelling crumbling. NEW YORK: Makoto Shinkai was never the same filmmaker after the 2011 earthquake stuck Japan.

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