Is Loundraw the new Makoto Shinkai?
Directors and Japanese cinematographic industrial re-production
Is Loundraw going to be the new Makoto Shinkai? Will Makoto Shinkai likely fill an industrial vacuum to be left by Hayao Miyazaki? Before we tread on to discuss Loundraw’s works, I believe it necessary we nuance such sensationalist framings.
The pedestal we erected for Ghibli’s director is overshadowing some of his contemporaries, such as co-founder and director Isao Takahata, known for Grave of the Fireflies (1988). Like every great man, and I insist on marking the patriarchal aspect, he didn’t exist outside of a context, a constellation of amazing and dedicated workers. Amongst said workers, there existed a gendered divide, as studied Rayna Denison in Studio Ghibli: An Industrial History (2023). But also the economic climate of the late 1980s seeing Japan rise to the top of the world. Specialist and mainstream media both participated to his fame.
This notoriety has an equivalent in academia. According to a survey I conducted in October 2026, classifying more than 4,000 anime studies or related papers by amount of citations featured in OpenAlex (like Scopus but free and open-source, a database of bibliographic and bibliometric multidisciplinary references, so great for academics, whether affiliated to institutions or independent researchers), Susan Joliffe Napier is the most quoted female scholar on Japanese animation, with 240 OpenAlex citations on Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle: experiencing contemporary Japanese animation (2005). It is significant that it’s the spiritual successor of a former best-seller of hers, stopping at Mononoke Hime (1997) in 2001. She also wrote Miyazakiworld: A Life in Art (2018), referred to in the beginning of her work by Rayna Denison. Even today, Miyazaki’s Mononoke Hime serves to explain Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s complex criticism of philosophers like Deleuze and Foucault, developed in Can The Subaltern Speak? (1985), a key pioneer of postcolonial feminist studies, in Shenghan Gao’s work on Princess Mononoke from the Perspective of Spivak’s Postcolonial Feminism (2026) [1].
Hayao Miyazaki didn’t only work as movie director. With Isao Takahata, he was involved in trade unionism at the Toei Doga studio in the mid-1960s, himself the general secretary.
He did key animation for the pilot episode of Inspector Gadget. He also distinguished himself as a mangaka with Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, published from 1982 to 1994. Though this paragraph may seem a little out of place at first, it has a purpose in further complexifying the figure of a director we sometimes hear about unidimensionally.
While some may think Gorou Miyazaki is the best positioned Japanese director to replace his father, the heavy backlash faced due to using CGI by his most mature cinematographic production up to now, Earwig and the Witch (2020), is a discouraging signal. Having not personally seen the movie, I can’t say it’s as bad as people may have felt. But the contemporary success found by Makoto Shinkai is well-deserved. Not only is he as talented in various aspects as Hayao Miyazaki, even as a writer (although I remember only reading The Garden of Words from him proper, his short and feature films demonstrate a certain stylish identity when it comes to narratives), but he creatively spearheads the CoMix Wave Films studio.
And that’s the point leading me to pen this piece. I believe this entire reflexive thread is a way to identify a core part of the structuration of the Japanese animation industry: the renewing of its creative elites. It is through short films that Makoto Shinkai could demonstrate at several occasions what style he could bring to anime. Kanojo to Kanojo no Neko (1999) and Hoshi no Koe (2002) for instance.
Loundraw, by comparison, has authored several short films that have garnered critical acclaim by the medium’s vanguard. I noticed him as a creator only by changing something fundamental in my consumption of anime, looking for ads. Quite literally, several of Loundraw’s anime credits on MyAnimeList come from commercials, like Ichiban Chikakute Tooi Hoshi (2021), Futari-bun no Shoumei (2022), Itsuka no Watashi Yori (2025). In a way, Cross Road (2014) by CoMix Wave Films, featuring Makoto Shinkai as director, is an ad that demonstrates the possible comparison between the early career of Loundraw and his own. Loundraw has also directed the movie Summer Ghost (2021).
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Consider the following: Hayao Miyazaki was born in 1941, during the war. Whereas Makoto Shinkai was born in 1973. Loundraw is of another generation altogether, from 1994. All studios they are closely associated with produced (and in the case of Loundraw that would be Flat Studio) both movies and advertisements, so commercial animated productions that either seek to sell a product or be financed through theater seats, possibly goodies too…
The entire point about the renewal of elites in anime as a medium is that generations come and go. But the conditions for a Miyazaki to eclipse all others in his time may no longer be there. First off, there are also female directors that enjoy some degree of popularity, and perhaps more importantly, visibility. I think for anime as a medium to be inclusive, it comes down also to its industry, specifically in the highest creative places, although management-wise it also helps. And it’s, thus, also part of our shared responsibility as critics or writers conscious of shaping anime studies as a whole to promote and visibilize the labor of female creatives in the anime industry. Naoko Yamada is popular enough that I expect readers to know her, for Liz and the Blue Bird (2018), Koe no Katachi (2016). Mari Okada too has deserved renown for Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms (2018), Alice to Therese no Maboroshi Koujou (2023).
Tentai Kansoku (2023) is a short film by Flat Studio, whose director is Loundraw. It’s a part of TOHO Animation’s tenth anniversary project. I think in itself, it condenses much of Loundraw’s style of animated direction, and why it feels closer to Makoto Shinkai than the essence of Hayao Miyazaki’s artistic identity. Throughout the short film whose title stands for “Astronomical Observation”, we get a foundational humanism. Humans are at the center stage, whereas Miyazaki’s animated movies feature anthropomorphic animals for instance.
The short narrative plays the cultural leitmotiv of boy meets girl, just like in Shinkai’s quintessential filmography. I can’t blame it, though: for an advertisement, it seeks the most effective, condensed way to pull on heartstrings at scale, and it happens to be cisheterosexuality. The phenomenological attention paid to character performance and backgrounds, as well as compositing, is a testimony to a will to maintain a low suspension of disbelief, perhaps unlike Shinkai and Miyazaki in that regard. Shinkai and Miyazaki often feature stuff like fantasy elements, after all. But Miyazaki’s time of cel-painted backgrounds, although nostalgia-filled, doesn’t compare aesthetically (and notice I emphasize not that it’s better because the future is now, but that it’s artistically different!) with the contemporary use of CGI, digital tablets… Which is the material substract to Loundraw’s current artistry.
Loundraw is also famous for having begun his industrial participation in Japanese ACGN through illustrations on novels such as Fuwafuwa-san ga Furu (2014), Otomodachi Robo Choco (2015), up to Kimi wa Tsukiyo ni Hikarikagayaku (2017), preceding his involvement in anime commercials and feature films.
To conclude, today we’ve studied a bit the place of Hayao Miyazaki in anime history, and therefore also the place of directors in anime studies, notably via scholarship. We’ve therefore questioned whether there would be someone to replace him in an eventual industrial vacuum. Whether his son, Gorou Miyazaki can take his place — which may subject him to unfair comparisons at a point of growth in his creative career, possibly stunting it — , or if Makoto Shinkai is the de facto follower in how the press may reify a single, male director as domineering the industrial elite… We’ve also put forward the reality that there are now women that are installed in the landscape of contemporary Japanese animation as directors, something that us critics need to visibilize to contribute to the medium’s, and Japan’s, inclusive nature. And, in summing up the fact Loundraw, Miyazaki and Shinkai all had studios around them, that were involved in advertisements alongside movies and short films as far as productions went, we have also highlighted the plurality of forms taken by Japanese animation in an effort to be sustainable, from a period of Japanese domination of the world economy to a slow decline in stagflation. In the end, we showcased part of what seems to make up Loundraw’s current style unique through Tentai Kansoku (2023), while inspired moreso by Shinkai as a contemporary than Ghibli’s Miyazaki as a pioneer of several generations ago.
References
[1] Shenghan Gao, March 2026. “Princess Mononoke from the Perspective of Spivak’s Postcolonial Feminism”, Communications in Humanities Research 104(1):114–119 DOI:10.54254/2753–7064/2026.HT32045
[2] Animation Obsessive, October 11, 2021. “Hayao Miyazaki, Union Man”, Substack.
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