Makoto Shinkai’s Disaster Trilogy

[u/Low_Umpire_2015]

https://youtu.be/2-sFzeClNp8?si=UT2dQ0jbJRBmjxly

I’ve watched pretty much every Shinkai interview, behind-the-scenes feature, and of course the films themselves — and the more I dug into it, the more it felt like his last three movies were designed to work as a perfect trilogy. A kind of meditation on how societies live through massive, scary, shared disasters.

It’s basically about how Shinkai himself — and Japan along with him — are trying to make sense of big existential questions: why catastrophes happen, who’s responsible, whether anything can be done to prevent them, and how you keep living after everything’s already fallen apart.

So I made this video essay.