Nearly two decades after the Japanese New Wave of the 1990s, the directors who led it, including Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Hirokazu Koreeda and Naomi Kawase, are still the local industry¡¯s most prominent faces abroad. But this year a new generation of filmmakers has finally started to make itself heard, with 36-year-old Koji Fukada winning the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at Cannes for ¡°Harmonium¡± (¡°Fuchi ni Tatsu¡°) and 43-year-old Makoto Shinkai obliterating the box-office competition with his animation ¡°Kimi no Na wa.¡± (¡°Your Name.¡°). Both generations found themselves on my best 10 list for 2016.
10 In This Corner of the World (Kono Sekai no Katasumi ni):
Sunao Katabuchi¡¯s animation about a young woman¡¯s life in prewar Hiroshima and wartime Kure has the ¡°We will struggle though to victory¡± message of a Keisuke Kinoshita World War II propaganda film. But just as Kinoshita truly depicted the human realities of his characters, so do Katabuchi and his animators, from the heroine¡¯s anguish and terror to her desperate longing for peace.
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