Attention to detail is important when making any film, but this is only amplified when working within the field of animation. Live-action cinema is deliberate, considered, but it can also take advantage of the world around us in order to immerse ourselves in the actions on screen. There’s no such crutch in the world of animation; whether you work in traditional hand-drawn animation, CG, stop-motion or anything in between, if you don’t make it, it doesn’t exist. This has advantages, warping the world around your intended message, but requires a keen eye to be most effective.

Sunao Katabuchi is a creator routinely praised for exactly this, along with the care under which he brings his worlds to life. The director started his career at Telecom Animation and Mushi Productions working on films such as Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland before serving as assistant director to Hayao Miyazaki on Kiki’s Delivery Service. Although at one point slated to direct that film, Katabuchi’s eventual opportunity to helm his own—having proved his talent in TV animation—would come just over a decade later with 2001’s Princess Arete, which earned recognition at home and abroad for its grounded fantasy through the eyes of the titular child protagonist.

ing Madhouse shortly afterwards and making a name for himself working on the likes of the beloved TV anime Black Lagoon, he would direct his next feature, Mai Mai Miracle, in 2009, and then the critically acclaimed In This Corner of the World in 2016. Following the life of Suzu as she lives in the small town of Kure near Hiroshima during World War II, it beat out other beloved anime hits from the same year such as Makoto Shinkai’s Your Name for the top animation award at the Japan Academy Film Prize, the country’s equivalent of the Oscars.

With an impressive 4.0-out-of-five-star rating, In This Corner of the World is Katabuchi’s highest-rated movie with the Letterboxd community. Oscar Lau notes that because the poetic anime “avoids melodramatic and dialectic clichés normally found in the war film genre, [it] offers an in depth, heartwarming portrait of ‘everyday’ life for Japanese families before and during WWII”. That being said, this is a difficult viewing experience during certain moments, as one would expect from the sobering subject matter being explored. Though there are moments of hope peppered throughout, it is a film capturing the reality of life for civilians during the war. As Djongo puts it, “What was supposed to be a life-affirming [palate]-cleanse turned into one of the most devastating experiences this side of Grave of the Fireflies.”

Although not one of the first names that comes to mind in an anime landscape that’s internationally perceived as dominated by the likes of Miyazaki, Katabuchi’s works stand as some of the most artistically beautiful anime produced in recent decades. This comes in part from the director's precise attention to the minutia of each frame, a lesson learned during his days at Ghibli that has followed him ever since. One of Katabuchi’s key lessons from this period was a desire to match external specificities—like the whimsy of a childhood home or a stern but loving bakery—to equally rich interior worlds, making these characters feel truly alive.

Everything including once-lost photos painstakingly recreated, cooking lessons using the tools of the era and completely accurate weather forecasts for wartime Kure were exhibited during the event. Yet this careful recreation is not at the expense of its core characters, nor does it stop us entrenching ourselves within the abundant interiority of its protagonist Suzu, a character whose innocence is slowly shattered by senseless violence and the heartbreak felt for the people she’s lost.

The extended cut of In This Corner of the World recently screened as part of the 2023 Tokyo International Film Festival, where Katabuchi participated in a called “Possibilities of Animation Expression” with fellow animation directors such as Pablo Berger of Robot Dreams. I sat down with Katabuchi during the festival to gain some insight into his career to date and what drives his near-reverential eye for the little things.

“The movies I want to make are about the times and places I want to understand,” Katabuchi explains of this meticulous approach. “If I made things normally from what I already knew and could imagine, people may still enjoy those films, but I wouldn’t enjoy making them. I want to go to these places I don’t know, and when I think of these far-off times and places, I wonder things like what the weather was daily, so I’ll try and find out. I want the audience to savor and enjoy their experience, and feel about these films the same way I did making them.”

Whether talking about the postwar countryside childhood of Mai Mai Miracle or a wartime retelling from a bystander’s perspective, these are more than just settings for an animated film. These are recreations of a lost time, a step beyond what a documentary is able to achieve by not just ing our past but placing us within it in a manner inherent to animation. After all, it is through this medium that these places can not only be ed but reanimated. It’s a technique brought to effect by various animated documentaries such as Eternal Spring or Academy Award nominees like Flee or Waltz with Bashir.

Though certainly treated with the same reverence for historical fact and fastidious research, Katabuchi doesn’t find documentary to be a fair representation of his work, nor does he see that as necessarily being a goal for him with his approach.

“I think documentaries are something different to what I create,” he states. “I feel it’s important to experience these places. For example, with In This Corner of the World, Suzu is a housewife and works in the home, and I feel I was able to depict both that world and the world of these ships that were used for war because they existed in that same place. As the war continues, there’s a growing separation between the people and the war being fought, and I feel like with this film we created a space where there was a direct connection between these two worlds, which is what I wanted to explore.”

He continues, “I teach film at a university, and I asked one of my students what they thought of Suzu’s smile. She said that it felt like Suzu was right there with her the whole time during the film. But this girl didn’t know what it was like to live during wartime. [Ultimately,] I want to create films about the feelings inside, and those feelings aren’t real, they’re personal. Without recreating that world, you can’t understand these inner emotions, but that’s not a documentary.”

“I look for people who share a common way of thinking,” Katabuchi notes of the artists he frequently teams up with. “For example, on my new film, I’m working with [background artist] Kaneko Yuji. Nowadays, animation is mainly drawn digitally using computers, but he’s particular ing brushes, paints and paper. Looking at his work, I would think, ‘wouldn’t it be great to have this style’. I think if everyone’s using digital, then to retain and protect this style is really important.

“It’s important to have a lot of variety [within animation], rather than everything being the same and having one style across everything. I want to see animation that shows off the charm inherent to a variety of creative methods. In that case, Yuji and I are similar, and as the animation world moves in one direction, he’s like me as someone who wants to stop in a different place and go in a slightly different direction. I want to work with people like that.”

Though not a former associate, Masashi Ando—known for his work as a key animator at Studio Ghibli and with director Satoshi Kon, as well as directing 2022’s The Deer King with Masayuki Miyaji—will work with Katabuchi on The Mourning Children. Both met briefly during the last years of Studio Ghibli, although the ability for the two to work together is one that was only just finally achieved.

As he recalls, “Just before ing Studio 4C and just after Kiki’s Delivery Service, I had a short-time job training young animators, and of those, the best was certainly Ando. I only did it for a short time to help those newly hired by Ghibli, and that’s when we met, but I realized he had so much talent even at this early stage. I wanted to work with him for a long time, and it’s as if this desire finally came true with this film.”

At the end of the day, as that student noted to Katabuchi while they were watching In This Corner of the World, she may not have experienced what Suzu had to go through during wartime for themselves. But she definitely felt her smile.