Makoto Shinkai, the anime director at CoMix Wave that is responsible for movies such as Your Name, 5 Centimeters per Second, The Garden of Words, Voices of a Distant Star, and many others, confirmed via Twitter that he is working on a brand new project.
His original tweet is as follows:
日本映画批評家大賞にて監督賞をいただきました。新作作業中につき僕自身は出席は出来なかったのですが、たいへん光栄に思います。ありがとうございました！
新海誠監督：「君の名は。」で監督賞受賞もプロデューサーが代理出席 新作への言及なし https://t.co/5RMgC0SQKV— 新海誠 (@shinkaimakoto) May 16, 2017
For those who do not read Japanese, his tweet said:
“I received the best animation director award at the Annual Japan Movie Critics Awards. I was not able to attend because I am now working on my new project, but I am very honored. Thank you very much!”
Yuichi Sakai, the producer of Your Name, accepted the award as on Makoto Shinkai’s behalf and was quoted as saying, “I’m afraid director Shinkai cannot come due to various circumstances. But I’d like to express my gratitude instead,”
Your Name (Kimi no Na wa) continues to be a worldwide success. It was recently announced that the Japanese version of the DVD and Blu-Ray will be coming out on July 26. There is still no mention of a home media release for North America, U.K. or any other region just yet. The movie opened in U.S. theaters on April 7 thanks in part to licensing by FUNimation.
The Tweet doesn’t state what his new project is, however. It could be another full-length feature film or Makoto Shinkai could have returned to making television spots or short animated features/promotional material like he had been doing before creating Your Name. We hope to learn more details soon as another full-length movie would be exciting, but that would also beg the question of whether or not he could top what he did with Your Name!