‘A New Dawn’ Director Yoshitoshi Shinomiya on His Anime Breakthrough, Makoto Shinkai’s Influence and the Future of Cultural Heritage in Modern Japan

Yoshitoshi Shinomiya didn’t arrive at feature filmmaking via the usual routes of the Japanese anime industry. A traditional Japanese-style painter by training, and a longtime visual collaborator to filmmakers including Makoto Shinkai and Sunao Katabuchi, Shinomiya has built a reputation as a meticulous image-maker — an artist attentive to light, texture, and the emotional weather, unique to the expressive range of anime, that hovers somewhere between memory and landscape. He created the unforgettable flashback sequences in Shinkai’s acclaimed breakthrough, Your Name., crafted special scene work for Katabuchi’s award-winning In This Corner of the World, and moved fluidly between gallery installations, TV commercials and music videos before finally turning, after years of development, to an original anime feature of his own. That film, A New Dawn, made its world premiere this week in the main competition of the Berlin International Film Festival.

Set in a rural town where a…