Makoto Shinkai was born in Nagano Prefecture in 1973. In 2002 he debuted his self-produced short-film Voices of a Distant Star, which won many awards starting with the Tokyo International Anime Fair 21. In 2004 he created his first full-length movie The Place Promised in Our Early Days to great acclaim, which went on to win Best Animated Film at the 59th Mainichi Film Concours. In 2007 he released 5 Centimeters Per Second which won Best Animated Feature Film at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards, as well as the Lancia Platinum Grand Prize at Italy’s Future Film Festival. In 2011 Children Who Chase Lost Voices was released in theaters nationwide and presented internationally as a work unlike the world had ever seen before, winning the “Golden Monkey King” Award at the 8th China International Cartoon and Animation Festival. In 2012 he received a Letter of Appreciation from the Cabinet Secretariat’s National Policy Unit as one of the “Global Messengers of Japan”. In 2013 he released his biggest hit so far, The Garden of Words, which won Best Anime Feature Film in Germany’s Stuttgart International Festival of Animated Film. Also that year he was awarded the Shinmai Select Prize. Makoto Shinkai continues to receive acclaim domestically and internationally as one of the next generation of anime film directors.In 2016, Your Name. was released to great commercial success, becoming the second-highest-grossing Japanese film. At the 40th Japan Academy Prize, it won Excellent Animation of the Year and Screenplay of the Year, a first for an animated film. Also critically acclaimed overseas, it won many awards including Best Animated Feature Length Film at the 49th Sitges Film Festival, as well as Best Animated Film at the 42nd Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards. Weathering With You is Shinkai’s latest feature in 2019, has been a huge hit with over 10 million spectators.
