Please don’t see my film, says Your Name director Shinkai - I don’t want anime body-swapping megahit winning an Oscar
Brilliantly plotted supernatural love story is a massive hit in Japan and across Asia, and winning fans the world over, but its director says that’s ‘not healthy’ and rejects his label as ‘new Hayao Miyazaki’
Filmmaker Makoto Shinkai has a problem, a big problem. His mystical teenage body-swap movie Your Name has become such a massive hit it’s beginning to worry him.
“It’s not healthy,” the boyish director says. “I don’t think any more people should see it.”
Every week it gets closer to being the biggest Japanese animated film of all time. And now there’s talk of Oscars. “I really hope it doesn’t win,” he says.
It would be funny if Shinkai wasn’t so in earnest about getting off the promotional circuit and back to work.
He just wants to get on with his next story about teched-up Japanese teenagers. But the little animated film has become a runaway cultural juggernaut in Asia, and now it’s winning awards in the United States and Europe.
One in seven Japanese have already paid to see its brilliantly plotted supernatural love story about a boy and a girl who exchange bodies as a comet is about to hit the Earth.