Your Name director Makoto Shinkai revealed on his official X account that he recently visited Nihon Falcom. It turns out that the award-winning director used to work at the Japanese game company, known for the Ys, Legend of Heroes and Trails series.
Novelist and anime director Makoto Shinkai is best known for his emotionally impactful anime movies like Weathering with You and Your Name. Although starting off with the comedic premise of two high school students who find their bodies have been swapped, Your Name builds into a poignant film which smashed box offices around the world and put Shinkai on the map.
Before becoming a household name (at least among anime fans), Shinkai did a part time job at Nihon Falcom while in university, subsequently joining the company when he graduated. While making trailers and opening animations at Nihon Falcom, Shinkai began to work on his own anime, eventually leaving Nihon Falcom in 2001 to release his first feature, Voices of a Distant Star.
Not only was Shinkai able to catch up with former colleagues and friends at Nihon Falcom, he also shared that the company still had some of his storyboard sketches for the opening animation of Ys II Eternal (released in 2000, this was a Windows remake of 1998’s Ys II: Ancient Ys Vanished – The Final Chapter).
In his New Year greeting, Makoto Shinkai revealed that he spent 2024 working on a new movie, which he hopes to announce sometime in 2025.
Related article: I didn’t set out to be an animation director at first – “Your Name” director Makoto Shinkai reveals that audiences are what shaped him into who he is
