Children Who Chase Lost Voices

Of all Makoto Shinkai’s films, Children Who Chase Lost Voices (sometimes continued with From Deep Below and sometimes titled Journey to Agartha) has done the most to strengthen his reputation as ‘the new Miyazaki’. Especially Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky (1986) and Princess Mononoke (1997) seem to have inspired Shinkai’s subterranean Agartha, into which our young female protagonist Asuna, without truly knowing why, follows her substitute teacher Mr. Morisaki, who plans to retrieve his dead wife.

So, Orpheus and Eurydice, except that writer-director Shinkai based his story on the similar Japanese myth of Izanagi and Izanami, while plucking the name Agartha from 19th-century European occultism and populating his multicultural underworld with Aztec Quetzalcoatl, among others.

Romance does play a role, but relatively subdued, just as the art direction is less flamboyant in terms of colour, light and settings than we have come to expect from Shinkai. This fits the overarching themes of mourning and loneliness, accepting death as part of life, and learning to truly say farewell. With important supporting roles for cat Mimi and a crystal radio receiver.

The film premiered in May 2011, two months after the gigantic earthquake which would inspire Shinkai’s following ‘Disaster Trilogy’, Your Name. (2016), Weathering with You (2019) and Suzume (2022). But even though in Children Who Chase Lost Voices the earth remains unshaken, we already find the metaphysically transgressive, desperate love stories with which those films would break international box-office records.