The films of Makoto Shinkai (Your Name. / Weathering With You / Suzume)

I went looking for one, and couldn't find it, which I was a little surprised by.

Your Name (2016) is the second highest grossing Japanese film internationally, with Suzume (2022) at #4 and Weathering with You (2019) just outside the top 10, yet I think he doesn't get have quite the same name outside of Japan as Miyazaki / Ghibli?
He's not necessarily the person to recommend to someone who thinks they don't like Anime (though probably a better bet than the highest grossing, "Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – The Movie: Mugen Train") - I mean, people have a lot of ideas about what Anime is, but mopey high-schoolers is one category, and this is largely in there (or - she's a mopey high-schooler, her love interest isn't, which is another fair cop).

Anyway, I have seen Your Name and Suzume and they were both great, I should see Weathering with You, are his earlier films (The Place Promised in Our Early Days / 5 Centimeters per Second / Children Who Chase Lost Voices / The Garden of Words) also recommended?

well he just remakes the same film over and over

garden of words has some really pretty depictions of rain!

he's the christopher nolan of anime, more or less. makes formally pristine blockbusters with big twists, isn't taken as seriously by hardcore buffs as by dabblers

I saw Suzume at the local Anime festival last year, I hadn't heard much about it at all. Your Name and Weathering with You have been on my "oh yeah I should check that out" list since I first heard of them, but this one had slipped past. I loved that it's easy to describe the opening few minutes in some standard anime tropey ways - high-schooler with confused memories, mysterious tortured older boy with a Dread Burden, a mystical world that overlaps ours, right up until "and then, the chair moves" and then it's a different film. Well, it's mostly a different film, but it feel like it kicks free of the standard mystical romance plots.

(not sure what to do about spoilers, apart from go watch WwH, it's been 6 years).

And then at the end of April, Your Name was showing at the local arthouse, and we both went along to see it - you can see why it's a big hit, very broad in some ways (which he's said he now regrets, IIRC), unexpectedly queer in others, but with a great twist and totally committed to the premise. I kind of wish it'd ended a few minutes earlier, but I am always a little leery of the "mystically drawn to each other" aspect whenever it appears

In conclusion

Just Souta and Harrison Ford, together at the #GoldenGlobes pic.twitter.com/DcSPYJbPTV

— Crunchyroll (@Crunchyroll) January 8, 2024

I mean, I've only seen the two, but they're pretty different in a lot of ways (including, you know, amount of time the protagonists spend together!)

They are beautiful though, that's a point I totally failed to make, they don't have the grotesqueries of Ghibli but do they look amazing, an excellent advertisement from the Japanese Board of Going Out To That Old Place That No-one Goes To Anymore.