Renowned anime director Makoto Shinkai's first feature film in three years follows in the footsteps of his previous two hit films to portray the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami. 

Shinkai's "Suzume no Tojimari" (Suzume’s door locking) is about a girl who remembers the devastating disaster and goes on a cross-country trip to contain mystical powers that trigger earthquakes.

"After all, I have always been thinking about the disaster with the three films that I made in the past about nine years," the director said.

"Suzume no Tojimari" is currently showing in theaters across Japan. 

Shinkai's latest work follows his blockbuster films "Your Name." (2016) and "Weathering With You" (2019).

DISASTER MEMORIES FADING

"Suzume no Tojimari" centers around Suzume, a 17-year-old girl who lives in a quiet town in Miyazaki Prefecture with her aunt.

She meets Sota, who is traveling across the country looking for magical doors from which reddish black clouds called "mimizu" come out to cause earthquakes.

His family has been locking these doors for generations without being noticed, but a mysterious cat named Daijin transforms Sota into a small chair.

Suzume helps Sota and goes on a journey to contain the mimizu clouds.

But the duo are faced with a crisis considered to be the second coming of the Great Kanto Earthquake, which occurred in 1923 and killed more than 100,000 people.

The film contains vivid portrayals of the earthquake.

Smartphones blare out the early quake warning alarm in one scene, while houses in Suzume's town are seen damaged in another.

She is also confronted with painful memories as she sees signboards that read "Difficult-to-return zone" set up in Fukushima Prefecture and a coastal area in Miyagi Prefecture where Suzume had lived with her mother, which still retains traces of tsunami damage.

In "Your Name.," a beautiful comet causes a catastrophe when its fragment falls as a meteorite on the Earth. And in "Weathering With You," low-lying areas in Tokyo are flooded due to extreme weather conditions.

But, in fact, these portrayals depict the 2011 disaster, the director said.

"The world was suddenly rewritten. Our everyday life will come to an end someday," Shinkai said. "I harbored such feelings after the disaster, based on which I have been making films."

He continued, "I wanted to convey the impact of the disaster to teenagers, many of whom see my films, and share the experience with them, so I created the 17-year-old protagonist, Suzume, who remains connected with the disaster through her vivid memories."

It was the novel coronavirus pandemic that made him depict the disaster in a straightforward manner.

"For teenagers these days, the pandemic is a big tragedy that has changed their school lives. That being said, I felt that the pandemic was making the disaster fade into a distant memory and this frustration gave me a push."

In his two previous films, the male protagonist saves the heroine, who is a "miko" (shrine maiden).

But in "Suzume no Tojimari," the male and female roles are reversed.

"I conceived it as a buddy story and not as a love story, so which one of them was male or female was secondary, or rather, I wouldn't care if they were of the same sex," Shinkai said.

"I also made the female character the protagonist because of the changes of the times. After 'Your Name.,' the big social cause prompted by the #MeToo movement drastically changed the world."

His latest project is also different from his previous two films in the sense that it features subdued portrayals of the bittersweetness of a coming-of-age story. While Suzume harbors romantic feelings--close to admiration--for Sota, he is more mature and acts like a guardian.

Another important factor is the relationship with Suzume's aunt, who has raised her for 12 years on behalf of her mother. The non-superficial drama of conflict and reconciliation shows Shinkai's creative maturity.

The director garnered attention in 2002 when he was still in his 20s with "Voices of a Distant Star," a short film which he produced almost single-handedly.

Shinkai will turn 50 next year.

"Probably because this project was a road movie, I had to exert enough effort to make two, or even three movies, and I didn't realize how old I have become until I performed this demanding work," he said. "I think it will be really tough to repeat it again, but I guess I can still do it."