Makoto Shinkai started out on video games before releasing his shorter film, Voices from a Distant Star. A sci fi love story. Even though it's not quite feature length, it is an important stepping stone in his fulltime transition into anime. His first feature film, The Place Promised In Our Early Days, combines friendships lost and renewed over time, and romance in an alternate divided Japan. The next film of his, 5 Centimeters Per Second, loses the sci fi themes and deals with romantic feelings lost over time as two people lose their connections.
Children Who Chase Lost Voices is a fantasy film. It deals with death and fantastical realms. After this film, Shinkai released The Garden of Words, a film under feature length by some standards. It is about a teenage boy who wants to be a shoemaker who comes to adore an older woman who is an unsure teacher avoiding class too. It is a film which starts to especially push the realism of setting which he is known for.
Next comes the film Your Name, the first of three high concept contemporary fantasy films that have made him a more popular director, being called the next Hayao Miyazaki, due to their popularity, though obviously his films are thematically very different to Miyazaki's. Weathering with You takes an especially unusual direction in that it is set in Tokyo, but a flooding Tokyo. Suzume no Tojomari is a fantasy about magical doors which need to be closed for the safety of people in Japan.
One thing that all most of Shinkai's works have in common is a focus on teenage love and the change in it over time, whether fulfilled or abandoned. And it's notable that like Miyazaki, he has started from sci fi, though more from video game roots than comic and manga roots, and then gone more into fantasy over time. He said that he wanted to get away from romance for this film and focus on female friendship but his producers meddled in the project and wasn't able to. I think it's a shame. Since I first started this post I've seen the film in theaters and it didn't quite live up to his past two films.
I only have one director outside of anime who has enough variety to deserve a thematic trajectory post: Francois Laguionie. I will publish the posts about other directors soon.
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