Makoto Shinkai’s Your Name is the highest-grossing anime film of all-time, and it hasn’t even come out in the United States yet. It beat Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away; give it a few more months and Your Name may beat Spirited Away as the highest-grossing Japanese film of all-time.
Shinkai built a strong following thanks to his OVA short Voices of a Distant Star (2003) and his feature-length debut The Place Promised in Our Early Days (2004). Some herald Shinkai as the next Miyazaki. (Mamoru Hosoda, director of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Summer Wars, and most recently The Boy and the Beast also comes up in these discussions.) Yet Your Name seems like a fluke mega-hit. That may be a western perspective. It’s a body swap movie, that quintessential 1970s/1980s comedy subgenre genre, and it’s so earnest that it doesn’t have the feel of your usual blockuster cash grab.
Since its release in Japan last year, the buzz for Your Name has been ecstatic. Some critics wondered why it wasn’t up for a Best Animated Film Academy Award. It’s sort of warranted. Just sort of. While I liked Your Name, I’m not sure I like-liked it.
[This film was originally reviewed following a screening at the New York International Children’s Film Festival. It has been reposted to coincide with the US theatrical release of the film.]
Your Name (Kimi no Na wa, 君の名は。)
Director: Makoto Shinkai
Rating: PG
Release Date: August 26, 2016 (Japan); April 7, 2017 (USA)
Country: Japan
Our two body-swapped and star-crossed heroes are a country girl named Mitsuha and a city boy named Taki. Apropos of nothing, the two teens swap bodies. At first they think they’re dreaming–as Mitsuha in Taki’s body struggles as a waiter in a restaurant, she wonders when her long and bizarre dream will end. Taki in Mitsuha’s body begins each morning copping a feel like a creeper. They intermittently lead each other’s lives, and they come to enjoy the ability to live a life so different from their own day-to-day. The allure, like most body swap films, is in the contrast of experiences–metropolitan and pastoral, modern and traditional, the social norms of male and female, etc.
My enjoyment of Your Name can be broken into quarters. I loved the first quarter of the movie, which was a great modern take on the body swap genre. The city boy and the country girl get to know each other obliquely, corresponding through their own cellphones with do’s and don’ts about each other’s lives. Shinkai closes that opening quarter with a fantastic montage of the joys and frustrations of living another life only to return to the mucked-up nature of your own. I liked the second quarter of Your Name, which, without spoilers, involves a mystery and a journey. Tonally it reminded me a little of Hirokazu Koreeda’s charming I Wish, though an adolescent version.
As for the last half of Your Name? It was all right. “Generally acceptable” may be a more accurate phrase.
So much about Your Name hinges on a major plot twist and the way the narrative treats this revealed information. If I wasn’t on board with the first portion of the film, the swerve at the halfway mark would have soured me on the whole movie. It’s all dependent on a series of narrative conveniences that the story doesn’t attempt to explain: spotty memory, technological failure, the loose rules of the body swapping, a lack of common sense from the characters, lapses in human curiosity.
And yet, somehow, I think Your Name still works by the end because it is so earnest about its teenage feelings. There’s the desire to be understood by someone, to forge a lasting connection, to make sense of your own life. That’s all there. I watched the movie in a crowded theater full of teens and young adults. As a plot twist occurred in the second half, gasps rustled through the crowd. After that emotional gut reaction, the analytical bits in my brain stepped forward and processed the information. No, a little too convenient, but just go with it. This kept happening in the last half of the movie. I found myself liking moments even though I was of two minds about them.
There’s a gorgeous scene set at dusk before a dimming sky. It’s quiet, it’s memorable, it was enough for me to disregard a lapse in logic a few scenes before. A young woman in the crowd, excited by the connection that occurred on screen, whispered an elated “Yes“. Minutes later, sighs from the crowd, crestfallen, like everyone had breathed out at once. I couldn’t help but be moved as well–I felt what someone else was feeling, which is what Your Name is about at its best.
Oddly, some of my qualms come from understanding Shinkai’s point of view as a storyteller. To affect the audience the way he wants to, Shinkai needs to move the story in direction P, therefore actions L, M, N, and O have to occur. I saw the movie with Steve over at Unseen Films, and his immediate feelings for the movie were far more tepid than mine. The logical lapses were so apparent to him. My own fondness for the first half of the film led me to justify those logical lapses to him even though I noticed them as well. And I have to admit, my justification was because I understood Shinkai’s storytelling motivations rather than any diegetic explanation provided by the film.
I can’t recall who said this or if I’m even getting it right, but there’s a sandwich rule when it comes to storytelling. Say you make a movie. Part of it doesn’t make sense. If an audience member doesn’t realize there’s a lapse in logic until hours later when they’re making a sandwich, the story is successful.
Your Name didn’t pass the sandwich test with me, but I could sense it did with many others in the crowd. Even without the sandwich test, there was a lot to admire. If only the last half had hooked me more, not by plot twists but through the characters, not by letters signifying Shinkai’s moves but rather that ineffable emotional stuff that’s harder to figure out and impossible to name.
