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      ‘No Need to Worry,’ Says ‘Wallace and Gromit’ Film Studio, After Clay Supplier Shuts Down

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      Rumors that Aardman Animations, the makers of stop-motion films, had lost their supplier worried fans. But fear not, the studio reassured, there is plenty of clay.It might have been an existential question for the creators of the beloved stop-motion animation characters Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep: What would happen if they ran out of clay?Fans spent the weekend worrying about the fate of Aardman Animations when the British newspaper The Telegraph reported that the studio, based in Bristol, England, would be facing its “hour of knead” after the only manufacturer of the special clay used in its creations had closed its doors earlier this year. Having bought what it could, The Telegraph reported, the studio had enough clay left to make only one more film, a new “Wallace and Gromit” feature coming next year.But no, the studio’s foundations are not crumbling. Aardman Animations said on Monday it had plenty of clay to keep molding.Fans had “absolutely no need to worry,” the studio said in a statement. The studio has “high levels of existing stocks of modeling clay to service current and future productions,” it said.The manufacturer of the clay, Newclay Products, announced last month that it had stopped selling its products in March. The company had become known for Lewis Newplast, a Plasticine beloved by animators that is malleable enough to mold but strong enough to keep its shape during filming. Newclay Products did not immediately respond to a request for comment.“Shaun the Sheep.”Cinematic/Alamy Stock PhotoBut its directors, Paul and Valerie Dearing, told The Telegraph that they were retiring and had decided to close the company’s doors after they couldn’t find anyone to take it over. They said Aardman had bought about 400 kilograms, or almost 900 pounds, of the remaining Newplast stock.More than a ton of modeling clay is ordered for each of the studio’s feature films, and about half that is used to shape the characters, according to modelers for Aardman.Aardman on Monday sought to reassure fans, telling them that once its supplies of Newplast were gone, it had plans to transition to new stock.“Much like Wallace in his workshop, we have been tinkering away behind the scenes for quite some time,” it said, referring to the eccentric inventor who is one of Aardman’s most beloved characters.The studio is famed for its signature Claymation style, producing hits such as the “Wallace & Gromit” franchise, the spinoff series “Shaun the Sheep,” and the 2000 film “Chicken Run.”A sequel, “Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget,” is set to be released on Netflix on Dec. 15, and the studio will also release a new “Wallace & Gromit” film in 2024, premiering on Netflix and the BBC. More

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      ‘The Inventor’ Review: Leonardo da Vinci in the Limelight

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      This playful movie uses stop-motion and hand-drawn animation to pay homage to Leonardo as a thinker and tinkerer.More than once in “The Inventor,” an animated feature about Leonardo da Vinci, powerful patrons tell that Renaissance polymath to behave “like a good little artist.” This advice comes first from Pope Leo X (voiced by Matt Berry) and later from Louise of Savoy (Marion Cotillard), the devoted mother of King Francis I of France.The notion of a great mind that is both beneficiary of and handmaid to the agendas of the powerful runs throughout this admirably artisanal appreciation of Leonardo’s intellect and innovative spirit, which follows him (Stephen Fry) as he leaves Rome to become King Francis’s maestro. The directors, Jim Capobianco (who also wrote the screenplay) and Pierre-Luc Granjon, keep the artist’s paintings secondary to his exploits as a thinker and tinkerer. Their engaging voice cast also includes Daisy Ridley as Leonardo’s royal champion, Marguerite de Navarre, and Gauthier Battoue as the king, who proves to be in dire need of an ego-stroking statue.The filmmakers use stop-motion puppetry and hand-illustrated animation to capture Leonardo’s story. This brings to life his fears and fascinations, while drawing out both the wonder and the tribulations he experiences as he searches for the “answer to life itself,” while struggling to work under the command of the powerful. (Here, “The Inventor” shares a theme with a decidedly less child-friendly recent big-screen portrait, “Oppenheimer.”)In honoring this beautiful mind, the plot’s forward motion lags at times. “The Inventor” is rife with somewhat didactic lessons — about power, innovation, curiosity — yet a presumably unintended one might be that lessons themselves, however insightful, are not always captivating.The InventorRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters. More

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      How the ‘Spider-Verse’ Influenced the New ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ Movie

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      The new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie and other C.G.I. cartoons are taking a looser, imperfect approach. The style represents a shift made possible by Spidey’s success.When “TMNT,” a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles animated film, was released in 2007, the critic Jeannette Catsoulis wrote in The New York Times that it offered “an impressive lack of visual texture.” She was not wrong. The eponymous reptiles are rendered in an inert computer-generated form, as if they were modeled from plastic and then put on a screen. Their green skin is dull and smooth.The same cannot be said for the turtles in the latest incarnation of the ooze-filled tale: “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem.” In this new film, released Wednesday, our heroes — Michelangelo, Donatello, Leonardo and Raphael — appear to spring from a (talented) high school doodler’s notebook. Their bodies and faces are rendered with an imperfect sketchy quality that makes their eyes vivid and their smiles vibrant. Their greenness is distinctive and gains extra contours when reflected in New York’s neon lights.“Mutant Mayhem,” directed by Jeff Rowe, is representative of a larger shift that has occurred in the 16 years since “TMNT” was released. It’s part of a wave of films that proves computer-generated animation doesn’t have to look quite so, well, boring.The turtle heroes in “TMNT,” from 2007, look as though they are molded from plastic.Imagi Animation StudiosThere’s an imperfect quality to the heroes in the new “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem.”Paramount PicturesSo what happened? Well, in 2018, “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” was released. “Into the Spider-Verse” — along with its even more technically virtuosic sequel, “Across the Spider-Verse” this summer — bucked the trend of modern animation by invoking its hero’s comic-book origins with Ben-Day dots and wild, hallucinogenic sequences.Since “Into the Spider-Verse” became a box office hit as well as an Oscar winner, major studios have grown less fearful of animation that diverges from the norm. The film proved that audiences wouldn’t reject projects that look markedly different from the house styles of Pixar (“Toy Story”) and DreamWorks (“Shrek”). Films like “Mutant Mayhem,” “The Mitchells vs. The Machines,” “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish” and “Nimona” all have distinctive looks that are visually sensational without conforming to established playbooks.It’s exciting for the filmmakers, too. “All animators ever did before that was have lunch with each other and bitch about how all animated movies look the same,” Mike Rianda, director of “The Mitchells,” told me in an interview. (Rianda is a member of SAG-AFTRA and spoke before the strike.)Rianda — who worked on that movie alongside Rowe, its co-director — was developing it at Sony Pictures Animation while “Into the Spider-Verse” was in the works. (Both were produced by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller; “The Mitchells” was eventually released on Netflix in 2021.) “The Mitchells,” about a kooky family’s road trip during an A.I. takeover, looks like a window into the overstimulated mind of its teenage heroine, Katie Mitchell (voiced by Abbi Jacobson), an exuberant film geek — and Rianda and Rowe wanted the animation to have all of her quirks. They felt that the humans should look imperfect and asymmetrical rather than like Pixar’s “The Incredibles,” because the plot concerned a battle between Homo sapiens weirdos and regulated robots. “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” blended techniques from 3-D C.G.I. with hand-drawn animated looks.Sony PicturesStill, there was pressure from the studio to go the standard route. “That’s easy,” Rianda said. “The computer knows how to do that. It’s already been taught that. It was wonderful to have ‘Spider-Verse’ going on in the next room so we could point to it and say, ‘Look, they’re doing it. We can do it too, right?’”Films like “Into the Spider-Verse,” and those that have followed in its footsteps, blend animation techniques that are common in 3-D computer-generated movies with those that were commonplace in the 2-D hand-drawn animation that preceded it. It’s not just that the images are less photorealistic, the movements of the characters are as well. The results are more broadly impressionistic in the ways that Looney Tunes cartoons, Disney classics or decades of anime have been.For instance, when the cat hero of “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish” sticks his sword into the thumbnail of a giant in the bravura musical opening sequence, the sky goes yellow as the giant gasps with pain. The giant’s thumb turns red, and white lines reverberate in the background mimicking the throbbing.“The Last Wish,” directed by Joel Crawford, is linked to the era of animation dominated by C.G.I.; it is a spinoff of “Shrek,” a hallmark of that time. For Crawford, “Into the Spider-Verse” showed studios that “audiences were not only accepting of different styles but craved it because you get the same thing over and over.”Crawford wanted to keep Puss recognizable to fans, but put him in the context of a “fairy tale painting.” That meant rendering his fur more as brushstrokes rather than strands. Fur is actually a good barometer of the shift. In the 2022 DreamWorks caper “The Bad Guys,” which follows a group of animal criminals, the wolf ringleader’s coat looks like it has been shaped by pen strokes, a change from the way his fuzzier lupine brethren were crafted in Disney’s 2016 comedy “Zootopia.”With “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish,” the director Joel Crawford aimed for a “fairy tale painting.”DreamWorks AnimationBut all the animation directors I spoke with argued that the art has to come from a thematically relevant place. For “Nimona,” now on Netflix, the directors Troy Quane and Nick Bruno landed on what they described as a “two-and-a-half-D” style that evoked medieval paintings, a fitting look for their graphic-novel adaptation set in a futuristic world with the chivalrous customs of the Middle Ages. A trailer for Disney’s upcoming “Wish” has an illustrated quality in line with its storybook fable plot about a star descending from the sky. The effect is something out of an Arthur Rackham illustration or a Beatrix Potter book mashed up with “Frozen.”Rowe’s initial goal for “Mutant Mayhem” was just to be as bold as possible, excising any timidity he had felt about pushing boundaries on “The Mitchells.” As he spent more time working on the world of the Turtles, he figured out where those impulses were coming from and how they’d fit into the story. He and the production designer, Yashar Kassai, rediscovered drawings they had done as teenagers. “There’s just this unmitigated expression and honesty to those kinds of drawings,” Rowe said. “It’s a movie about teenagers; that’s our North Star. Let’s commit to the art style looking like it was made by teenagers. Ideally the world and the characters will look like they drew themselves.”As a viewer, I find it’s invigorating to see the animators on “Mutant Mayhem” quite literally coloring outside the lines. When the turtles jump across rooftops, the moon behind them appears to be vibrating scribbles. You can see (digital) pen lines in explosions and expressions.“At first ‘Spider-Verse’ gave people permission,” Rowe said. “And now I think with ‘Spider-Verse 2,’ it’s made it a mandate. I think if anyone makes a film that looks like a C.G. 3-D film from the last 30 years now, it’s going to feel dated.” For audiences, that’s great news. More

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      ‘The First Slam Dunk’ Review: Style Points

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      A popular sports manga about a Japanese high school basketball team vaults to the big screen in an exhilarating, gorgeous anime.“The First Slam Dunk” is a great basketball movie because it understands what’s great about basketball. When a character catches a pass, drives toward the paint, steps back, squares up and releases a clutch 3-pointer, the movie slows time, drops the sound and homes in on exactly the right detail — the perfect, crystalline swish of the ball passing through the basket and gently grazing the net.Bringing all of the kinetic, over-the-top style of Japanese anime to bear on the granular, technical athleticism of high school ball, “The First Slam Dunk” is a one-of-a-kind sports drama somewhere between “Hoop Dreams” and “Dragon Ball Z.” You’d expect a movie with that title to have some pretty spectacular jams, and you’d be right. What surprised and delighted this N.B.A. obsessive is that it dazzles just as much with passes and rebounding. This feels like real basketball.Based on the long-running and beloved Weekly Shonen Jump manga “Slam Dunk,” and written and directed by the manga’s writer and illustrator, Takehiko Inoue, “The First Slam Dunk” centers on the starting lineup of the Shohoku High School basketball team as it competes for the national championship. The entirety of the film’s two-hour run time takes place over the course of this one game, broken up by flashbacks that give insight into the lives of the players, including the troubled point guard Ryota (Shugo Nakamura) and the self-centered power forward Hanamichi (Subaru Kimura).The flashbacks are well-written and add off-the-court dramatic interest, but it’s the basketball action that is the movie’s claim to excellence. Expertly staged and beautifully rendered using a combination of computer-generated imagery and traditional hand-drawn animation, it’s often so spectacular that I am eager to watch again.The First Slam DunkRated PG-13 for mild language and some dark themes. In Japanese, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 4 minutes. In theaters. More

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      When Spider-Man Met Jeff Koons

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      Our critic spots references to Hilma af Klint and Lichtenstein in “Across the Spider-Verse.” Koons, who inspired the film’s creative team, gets top billing with an animated survey (before his work is destroyed).“Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” the sequel to the 2018 reimagining of the arachnid-adolescent superhero, doubles down on the first installment with an inventive and magpie visual style. The result is, at least in part, a crash course in art history (literally so, as characters frequently crash into works of art).While the film is largely rendered in computer-generated animation that speeds by at a dizzying clip, there are moments of slowed, even stunning beauty: backgrounds dissolving with painterly effect, shifting into emotive abstraction reminiscent of, at turns, the work of Kandinsky, Mondrian and Hilma af Klint. New York’s cityscape is softened into brushy, Impressionistic swaths. Ben-Day dots stutter across the screen, a nod to the story’s comic book source material, but also calling up Roy Lichtenstein’s appropriations of the same.Justin K. Thompson, a director of the film, said the collision of techniques and applications was deliberate. “We wanted to emulate dry brush, watercolor, acrylic,” he said. “I looked a lot at the work of Paul Klee, the work of Lyonel Feininger.” The experimental films of John Whitney, a pioneer of computer animation, were another inspiration.There are also a number of more direct allusions to contemporary art. An early set piece in the Guggenheim Museum’s Frank Lloyd Wright building allowed the filmmakers gleeful abandon. A version of the perennial Spider-Man villain Vulture that appears as if lifted from a Leonardo da Vinci parchment drawing tumbles through the museum’s rotunda, wielding weapons inspired by da Vinci’s fanciful and terrifying inventions and causing havoc in what quickly appears to be a Jeff Koons retrospective. The fight scene deploys several of Koons’s sculptures of inflatable toys, like “Lobster” (2003) and “Dolphin” (2002), hurled as projectiles. Naturally, a Koons Balloon Dog, his most readily recognizable work, receives top billing.The scene’s version of Vulture, grappling here with one of the multiverse’s many Spider-Men, appears as if lifted out of a Leonardo da Vinci drawing.Sony Pictures Animation“When we talked about the Balloon Dog we said, ‘What could we do with it? What would be special?’” Thompson told me. Koons, he recalled, “was actually the one who said, ‘You know, one thing about the Balloon Dog is it’s this thing that has a lot to do with breath. It’s filled with human breath. But we’ve never actually seen the inside of one. What if we cut one open and we could see what was inside?’ And we just kind of looked at each other, like, ‘But what’s inside?’ And he said, ‘Whatever you want.’”What’s inside ended up being a sight gag that follows after Vulture lops off the head of a 12-foot-tall Balloon Dog, from which spill countless smaller Balloon Dog sculptures, satisfying the nagging suspicion that Koons’s outsize works are in fact elaborate piñatas. (The scene brought to mind an episode earlier this year, where a collector visiting the Art Wynwood fair in Miami accidentally shattered a 16-inch edition. The film was already well through production.)“It was moving to me,” Koons said on a phone call from Hydra, Greece, “because I always thought of the Balloon Dog as kind of a ritualistic work, something that could have a mythic quality to it, a little bit like a Trojan horse or Venus of Willendorf, where there would be some form of tribal community.” (His own balloon Venus did not seem to make the final cut.) Koons considered the Balloon Dog’s presence in the film as “truly participating in a larger community where people can rally around it.”Spider-Woman joining the fray during the Guggenheim battle. In our own universe, the Jeff Koons retrospective took place at the Whitney.Sony Pictures AnimationThe scene, which also features several of Koons’s earlier, stranger and less exposed works, like the polychromed wood sculpture “String of Puppies” (1988), from the “Banality” series, the stainless steel bust “Louis XIV” (1986), and several of his 1980s vacuum cleaner assemblages, is a homage to an artist who served as the original, if indirect, influence for the first “Spider-Verse” film’s direction. In 2014, while still in an early conceptual phase and at an impasse as to how to create a kind of postmodern version of the deathless hero, Phil Lord, a co-writer of the screenplay, and Christopher Miller, a producer, visited the Koons retrospective at the Whitney Museum. Lord has said the exhibition crystallized their thinking.“You could look at ‘The New,’ ‘Equilibrium,’ ‘Luxury & Degradation,’ ‘Antiquity,’ ‘Hulk Elvis,’ all different bodies of work that possibly seem like this kind of multiverse,” Koons offered. “Where you could have things existing at the same time but in different ways.”Whether the deep dive into Koons’s oeuvre resonates with casual viewers is another story. As the plot swings between slightly overbearing teen angst and extrapolations into quantum physics — itself an extended metaphor for the angst-inducing, open-ended possibilities of adolescence — the art in-jokes feel like a concession to adult aesthetes. (“I think it’s a Banksy” is a one-liner recycled from the first film, referring to something that looks nothing like a Banksy. Everyone laughed at the joke at the Upper West Side screening I attended, but not at the Koons stuff.)Spider-Man and Spider-Woman in a quiet moment. The film’s animated images often speed by at a dizzying clip.Sony Pictures AnimationThe idea that, in an alternative universe, Jeff Koons’s career booster took place at the Guggenheim instead of the Whitney is perhaps the most in-joke of them all, something even seasoned art-world insiders might not have fully appreciated. “There was a discussion for many years that I would have my retrospective at the Guggenheim — it never happened,” Koons told me. “So it was wonderful to see.”For his part, Koons gushed about the result: “I think the film is really astonishing, and I think culturally it’s playing a very important role for a whole generation of young people to inform them about the possibilities of perception.” He went on to say, “I never had seen richer colors — the reds are phenomenal!” Koons was born in ’55 and grew up on Disney. “There was a certain point in the ’70s maybe where we saw animation fall off,” he said, “and then with Pixar we saw this tremendous leap forward. The film uses that technology as a base but brings back a texture, really the texture of the senses. I mean, it’s like the way we perceive a Rembrandt or a Titian.”Asked if he was at all disturbed by seeing representations of his work obliterated by animated superheroes, Koons responded with Zen Buddhist diplomacy. “I care very much about the world. I care about living. I care about existence,” he said. “Everything turns to dust. The world around us turns to dust, universes turn to dust. What’s important is how we can enjoy the world that we’re in, and be able to have the perception of what our future can be. As an artist, it’s nice to feel in some way that the fine arts are able to participate within culture.” More

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      ‘Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken’ Review: Coming of Age is a Sea Change

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      The newest animated adventure from DreamWorks follows a high schooler who transforms into a giant tentacled sea creature.The protagonist of the clunkily named “Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken,” a DreamWorks production directed by Kirk DeMicco, is a headstrong high schooler with a secret: She and her family are aquatic animals passing as humans. Desperate to fit into the social scene in her seaside town, Ruby (voiced by Lana Condor) dutifully keeps up the ruse, but gripes about her parents’ cardinal rule against going in the ocean.One day, the teen tumbles into the waves and realizes their reason: Upon submergence, Ruby, like her mother (Toni Collette) and grandmother (Jane Fonda) before her, metamorphoses into a colossal tentacled sea creature. This device — conspicuously like the one in Pixar’s “Turning Red” — would be enough to motor a movie. “I’m a monster,” Ruby exclaims after a destructive mishap on terra firma, sending the needle on the viewer’s gauge for puberty metaphors flying into the red.But in this chaotic, family-friendly affair, a lone figurative image amid teenage drama will not do. Ruby soon ditches the shore, and her stresses expand to involve conniving mermaids, a salty, peg-legged seaman (Will Forte) and a magic trident tucked inside a submarine volcano. Not even the matriarchal link at the story’s center feels satisfying, its good intention strangled by the plotty chaos.Some evocative visual detail helps unify Ruby’s unruly world. The architectural design in her coastal hamlet is a considered hybrid of midcentury modern and nautical kitsch, and characters’ facial expressions are richly emotive. Underwater aesthetics are sadly sparer, accentuating the fluorescent marine fauna. Lurid neon blobs, like celebrity voice actors, seem a prerequisite for animated adventures these days.Ruby Gillman, Teenage KrakenRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘2023 Sundance Film Festival Short Films’ Review: Small Bites’

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      From animated partygoers to real families embracing a name, this basket of goodies includes seven titles, among them comedy, tragedy and documentary.Every year, features from the Sundance Film Festival can become critical favorites — “Past Lives” is a notable example — but the fest’s shorter works can fade away. The “2023 Sundance Film Festival Short Film Tour” brings a seven-film omnibus to cinemas across the country, and Kayla Abuda Galang’s “When You Left Me on That Boulevard” alone is reason enough to see it.This lovely and funny short portrays a Filipino American family’s Thanksgiving get-together through the eyes of Ly, an introverted teenager who’s a daydreamer even before she gets stoned with her cousins. It’s a film that contains both bustling images and delicate vibes, inner-voice stillness and subtle soundscapes, all of which can flourish in a movie theater.Galang seems especially drawn to dialing into private spaces in social situations, for example when Ly talks about her boyfriend as if to herself, until a cut reveals she’s surrounded by family members. Ly can sound endearingly oblivious, but instead of having the actor play that tendency for cheap laughs, the writer-director picks up on the warmth in the room.Galang also looks out for different ways of showing how the family is together, whether it’s karaoke — the short’s title comes from a song Ly’s aunt belts out — or a cool split shot of kids and parents hanging out on either side of a wall. If past Sundance collections are any guide, this short might preview a feature, and Galang’s immersive exploration of inner and outer spaces makes one eager to watch what comes next.Family bonds weather transitions in a number of the shorts. “Parker,” from Catherine Hoffman and Sharon Liese, the sole documentary in this selection, teases out a rich, arduous history of Black experience in a decision by members of a family in Kansas City to adopt the same surname. Interviews with the parents and their children show the love, and the fears and trauma, that can be inscribed in a name, and the peace of mind and unity promised by their choice.Resembling vérité nonfiction, Crystal Kayiza’s “Rest Stop” follows a Ugandan-American mother traveling with her three children to join her estranged partner. Kayiza dwells on scenes that a feature might relegate to a montage, the better to sit with feeling unsettled and tired and scattered, but pushing ahead to another future. Liz Sargent’s “Take Me Home” is also a portrait in becoming, as an overwhelmed, cognitively disabled woman (played by Sargent’s real-life sister, Anna) sends an S.O.S. to her sister after years of relying on their ailing mother.Comedies are well-represented in the collection: “Pro Pool” feels like a trailer for itself as it churns through retail workplace humor, while the stop-motion animation “Inglorious Liaisons” fondly portrays a goofy teen party, wherein people have light switches for faces. But Aemilia Scott’s shrewdly written, well-cast opener to the program, “Help Me Understand,” turns a focus group of women testing detergent scents into a nervy experiment in hung-jury dynamics. Shifting gears from satire to a double-edged dissection of point of view, it’s a snappy way of prepping viewers for the multiplicity of voices to follow.2023 Sundance Film Festival Short Film TourNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. In theaters. More

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      A Director and a Rock Band Are Redrawing the Contours of Anime

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      For hits like “Your Name” and now “Suzume,” Makoto Shinkai has worked with Radwimps on the narrative as well as the score. The results have won awards.Since the 2016 release of the global megahit “Your Name,” the stirring music in the animated epics of the Japanese director Makoto Shinkai has become inextricable from their transporting images.Shinkai’s recent high-stakes melodramas about star-crossed teenage lovers and impending supernatural catastrophes move to the up-tempo songs and luminous instrumental tracks of the Japanese rock band Radwimps. On multiple occasions, the band’s compositions have also persuaded the filmmaker to make significant changes to his narratives.In U.S. theaters Friday, “Suzume,” a fantastical saga inspired by the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, represents the third collaboration between the acclaimed storyteller and the musicians.The international popularity of Shinkai’s films has in turn broadened Radwimps’ audience to include fans beyond Japan’s borders. The band will kick off its first North American tour this weekend in San Jose, Calif.“Radwimps and I are two wheels of the same bicycle,” Shinkai, 50, said via an interpreter at a hotel in West Hollywood, Calif. “We need each other, and we are pushing one another forward.”Before enlisting Radwimps, Shinkai had worked with the composer Tenmon, a colleague from his time in video games, on the scores for his short films and early features.But on the more ambitious “Your Name,” a body-swap tale about a boy and a girl connected through time and space, Shinkai sought to differentiate himself from the influential anime production company Studio Ghibli, and from its co-founder, Hayao Miyazaki, in particular. Over the years, as Shinkai’s profile grew, the director said, journalists continually described him as “the next Miyazaki coming out of Japan.” Despite his unabashed admiration for the master animator, Shinkai disliked the constant comparisons.“For ‘Your Name,’ I wanted to do something Miyazaki would never do in one of his films, which was use rock music,” he said.When Shinkai, who had been a Radwimps fan for years, first approached the band in 2014, the artists had been playing together for over a decade but had yet to create music for movies. The lead singer and songwriter, Yojiro Noda, 37, saw this as a chance to reinvigorate the band and push its artistic boundaries while he learned new skills like orchestration.Upon reading the screenplay, Noda quickly turned around the songs “ZenZenZense” (“Past Past Life”), which became the propulsive soundtrack for the opening sequence, and the power ballad “Sparkle.”On “Suzume,” Shinkai, center, worked with Radwimps’ Yojiro Noda, right, as well as the composer Kazuma Jinnouchi.Suzume Film Partners“When I get the script, it’s like a ritual for me to write a few songs just right away without filter and without overthinking it,” Noda, speaking during a recent video interview from Tokyo, explained through a translator.From ages 6 to 10, Noda lived in the United States, and while his English vocabulary during that time was limited, two words stuck with him: “rad,” to describe something exciting, and “wimp,” with its negative connotation. Putting them together created an oxymoron that he thought fit his band, which he started with middle-school friends in the early 2000s.Radwimps has gone through multiple configurations over the years, with some members departing or going on hiatus. Its current lineup is Noda, who also plays guitar and piano; the bassist Yusuke Takeda; and the guitarist Akira Kuwahara.Once Noda decides on the melody and lyrical theme based on Shinkai’s text, he shares it with his bandmates, who enrich the sound with their instruments, synthesizers and percussion.The beautifully hyperbolic lyrics, however, are all Noda’s. “He’s one of the very few poets left in Japan right now who can write the way he does,” Shinkai said.The composer, who’s also written and performed English-language versions of some of the songs created for Shinkai’s animated romances, explained: “All of the music for ‘Your Name’ came from that longing to see each other that was so genuine and pure between the two characters, Mitsuha and Taki.”The “Your Name” soundtrack album debuted at No. 1 on the Japanese national album chart and stayed there for another week. That distinction came on top of the monumental box-office success that eventually turned the film into the third-highest-grossing Japanese production in the country’s history, animated or otherwise.“Radwimps’ music was essential to the success of ‘Your Name,’” Shinkai said. “It really propelled that film into a worldwide social phenomenon.”For Shinkai, Noda’s interpretation of his stories “feels like his way of giving me feedback on my screenplay, but it just happens to come in the form of music.” These exchanges, he believes, have become essential for him to see the full potential of what the film can be.Through his music, Noda essentially provided feedback on the “Suzume” screenplay, Shinkai said.CrunchyrollOn their second outing together, “Weathering With You” (2020), in which a young man must choose between love and saving Tokyo from torrential rain, Shinkai decided to expand a pivotal sequence where the protagonists fall from the sky after he listened to the choir voices featured in “Grand Escape,” one of the early songs Radwimps produced for the movie.Something similar occurred with “Suzume.” Noda delivered “Tamaki,” a song about the aunt and guardian of the 17-year-old title character. Inspired by the tune, Shinkai realized Tamaki’s relevance and added more interactions between her and Suzume. Such changes can be made because the band comes on board long before the visual development starts.For the theme song, “Suzume no Tojimari” (also the name of the film in Japan, where it’s already a hit), Noda listened to Shinkai’s suggestion that the music should capture the scent of the earth itself and the sound of the wind.They also agreed that since a girl is at the center of this whimsical coming-of-age saga, the track needed a female singer. After scouring multiple social media platforms for the right voice, they came across a TikToker named Toaka. She had no professional experience, but videos of her singing at home impressed them.Radwimps has now received three Japan Academy Awards — the country’s Oscar equivalents — for best music, one for each of their collaborations with Shinkai. (For “Suzume,” they shared the prize with composer Kazuma Jinnouchi, who created some of the score’s instrumental moments.)With no plans for the partnership to end, Noda thanks destiny, a concept crucial to the director’s metaphysical adventures, for bringing them together.“Shinkai often tells me there’s no limit to creativity,” Noda said. “He’s an inspiration, and writing songs for his anime is always going to be something special for me.” More