YOUR NAME Director Makoto Shinkai Teams With Crunchyroll for Mysterious New Anime Movie

Makoto Shinkai has another anime movie on the way, and if you’re hoping to find out what it’s actually about, you’re going to have to keep waiting.

The filmmaker behind Your Name, Weathering With You, and Suzume is officially teaming up with Crunchyroll and Sony Pictures Entertainment for his next feature, but just about everything concerning the movie itself remains a mystery.

Crunchyroll and Sony Pictures Entertainment will co-distribute Shinkai’s upcoming film, continuing the partnership that brought Suzume to audiences around the world. Beyond that distribution news, though, the team isn’t giving fans much to work with yet.

The press release makes that very clear: "Plot details, along with the title and release date, are not being disclosed at this time."

So, we’ve got a new Makoto Shinkai anime movie coming. We just don’t have a title, story, release date, characters, or much of anything else.

For a filmmaker whose movies are so visually distinctive and emotionally charged, that mystery makes it pretty easy to start wondering what kind of story he’s cooking up this time.

Shinkai has been making animated films for decades. His career dates back to the 1998 short The World Be Enclosed, and he made his feature-length debut with The Place Promised in Our Early Days in 2004. He continued developing his style over the years before reaching a massive international audience with Your Name in 2016.

That film became the second-highest-grossing movie of all time in Japan and remains one of the most celebrated anime films of its generation.

The story follows a teenage boy and girl who inexplicably begin switching bodies, eventually sending them on a search for each other that becomes much bigger and stranger than either expects. The movie currently holds a fantastic 98% score on Rotten Tomatoes.

Shinkai followed Your Name with Weathering With You in 2019 and then Suzume in 2022. Suzume went on to earn a Golden Globe nomination and further cemented Shinkai as one of the major filmmakers working in anime today.

We’ve actually known that another Shinkai movie was in development since 2024, when the director offered fans a small update on social media. At the time, he sounded pretty damn confident about what he and his team were creating:

"The entire staff is working hard every day on my new film. I'm confident it's going to be a great film, so please hang in there just a little longer until the announcement!”

Well, we’ve hung in there, and now we finally have another piece of the puzzle. It’s just a very small piece.

Crunchyroll and Sony getting involved gives Shinkai’s next anime film some serious international distribution power, especially after their work on Suzume.

What remains much more interesting is what Shinkai has planned creatively. His recent films have mixed romance, fantasy, disaster, supernatural ideas, and huge emotional swings with some absolutely gorgeous animation, so there are plenty of directions he could take his next story.

For now, speculation is pretty much all we’ve got. Considering Shinkai has already been working on the project for years and previously said he’s confident it will be a great film, hopefully the title and first real story details aren’t too far away.

Until then, Your Name is currently streaming on HBO Max, while Suzume is available to stream on Crunchyroll.