Original title: Kimi no na wa.
While Hayao Miyazaki dithered over whether or not he really was retired or not (thankfully for us all, he seems to have, as of Autumn 2021, sided once again on the side of being very much not retired), a likely contender for his position as Japan’s most beloved animator surfaced in the shape of Makoto Shinkai, a former video games animator who made his directing debut with the short film Kakomareta Sekai/The World be Enclosed (1998). A string of increasingly acclaimed and popular original video animation releases was followed by theatrical features like Kumo no Mukō, Yakusoku no Basho/The Place Promised in Our Early Days (2004), Byōsoku Go-Senchimētoru/5 Centimeters per Second (2007), Hoshi o Ou Kodomo/Children Who Chase Lost Voices (2011), Dareka no Manazashi/Someone’s Gaze (2013) and Kotonoha no Niwa/The Garden of Words (2013) eventually led to Your Name. which won numerous awards and became the biggest box office hit in Japan in 2016, it’s take surpassing that of Shin Godzilla (2016), Zootopia (2016) and Finding Dory (2016) combined. It even dwarfed the take of the first in the Star Wars sequel trilogy, The Force Awakens and Mizyazaki’s Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi/Spirited Away (2002) is the only Japanese film to have taken more money.
In 2013, Japanese teenager Mitsuha Miyamizu (voiced by Mone Kamishiraishi in the original Japanese and Stephanie Sheh in the English dub) is bored by her life in the small rural town of Itomori and idly wishes that she be reborn a boy in her next life. She gets her wish sooner than she expects when she finds herself occasionally switching bodies with teenage boy Taki Tachibana (Ryunosuke Kamiki/Michael Sinterniklaas) who lives in Tokyo. Bewildered and not a little frightened, the teens soon realise that they can communicate by leaving messages for each other on scraps of paper or as messages on each other’s phones. Mitsuha sets Taki up on a date with his co-worker Miki Okudera (Masami Nagasawa/Laura Post), while Taki helps Mitsuha to become popular at school. Intrigued by Mitsuha, Taki, Miki, and their friend Tsukasa (Nobunaga Shimazaki/Ben Pronsky) set off to find her but are horrified to find Itomori in ruins. It seems that Taki and Mitsuha have been swapping bodies across time as well as space (Taki is living in 2016) and the Mitsuha was one of hundreds of victims of the comet Tiamat, a celestial body that passes the Earth every 1,200 years, that fragmented in the atmosphere three years earlier. Taki begins to lose messages from and memories of Mitsuha. At a mountainside shrine tended by Matsuha’s grandmother Hitoha (Etsuko Ichihara/Glynis Ellis) and her sister Yotsuha (Kanon Tani/Catie Harvey), Taki tries to leave one last message for Matsuha, imploring her to leave the village before the catastrophe strikes. But will time be on their side?
There are clear similarities with the best of Miyazaki’s work at Studio Ghibli, but Your Name. (the full stop is an integral part of the title) is very much its own film. It shares with Miyazaki its gorgeous, highly detailed watercolour backgrounds, the vivid storytelling, and a plot that revolves around a young woman finding her place in the world, but its densely layered science fiction plot is a world (or two) apart from Miyazaki’s usual fantasy stamping grounds.
Shinkai certainly knows his audience. The early half of the film is littered with the inevitable gags about fascinations with new body parts (“no baths, no looking, no touching”), the awkwardness of dating, the difficulty of high school life and plenty of other topics that the adult who has put such things behind them might well roll their eyes at, but which younger audiences will immediately and passionately identify with. It’s all done so affectionately and with such conviction that Your Name. should work for just about everyone but the most cynical. They might enjoy the latter half more as the plot turns on a sixpence and plunges into headier and more cerebral territory.
The bold mid-film switch, which transforms the film from light-hearted high school fantasy comedy to something more metaphysical and conceptually daring is deftly handled by Shinkai. The move from breezy teen comedy to proper, hard science fiction laced with a dose of melancholy alienated some, but it’sn oart of what makes the film so beguiling. The youthful joie de vivre of the first half is replaced by something altogether more sober. The devastation at the comet splinter’s impact site would have had extra, chilling resonance coming so soon after the 2011 tsunami that struck the east coast of Japan and triggered the catastrophic meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear plant.
Themes of separation and longing are not uncommon in Shinkai‘s work – take the excellent, adult oriented anthology 5 Centimetres per Second for example, or the equally impressive and mature The Garden of Words – and it’s beautifully handled here. The film is often as moving as it is head-scratching, as emotional as it is intellectual. It’s also a pleasingly cinematic film with plentiful camera swoops and pans, evocative lighting and colour schemes and a breath-taking sense of scale, particularly in the atmospheric scenes set around the mountain shrine. It’s a film not afraid of emotions or a big idea or two and knows how to look absolutely stunning while exploring them.
The set-pieces are outstanding. There’s a particularly beautiful and surreal time travel sequence, a haunting pastel trip through the whole of Mitsuha’s life as a disembodied Taki tries to warn her of the impending catastrophe. But it’s often the quieter moments that impress the most. The fantastic, emotional final shot manages to be heart-breaking yet full of hope at the same time and will linger long after the cinema lights have come back up.
Your Name. is, quite simply, an animated masterpiece, a glorious, many layered film (as well as the huge, science fiction ideas, it worries about the fears that modern Japan might somehow be at odds with its past, about the clash between the urban and the rural and very gently and out prejudice explores increasingly complex matters of gender identity in a playful but still meaningful way) whose success at the box office should have come as no surprise at all. It confirmed Shinkai‘s reputation as the new king of anime, a reputation only cemented even further by his subsequent film, Weathering with You (2019), another gorgeous gem which featured Mitsuha and Taki in supporting roles. The film was, bizarrely, remade in 2017 as Kimi no nawa (2017), “hentai” (pornographic) retelling of the same story. More conventionally, and more predictably, an American live-action remake was in the works from 2017 from producer J.J. Abrams with both Marc Webb and Lee Isaac Chung attached to direct at various times.
Crew
Directed by: Makoto Shinkai; Amuse, CoMix Wave Films, East Japan Marketing & Communications Inc., Kadokawa, Lawson HMV Entertainment, The Answer Studio, Toho Company, Vogue Ting; Chief Executive Producers: Minami Ichikawa, Noritaka Kawaguchi, Kenji Ohta; Executive Producers: Yoshihiro Furusawa; Produced by: Kôichirô Itô, Genki Kawamura, Katsuhiro Takei, Noritaka Kawaguchi; Co-producer: Tatsuro Hatanaka, Shin’ichirô Inoue, Masanori Yumiya, Junji Zenki; Line Producers: Yukari Kiso, Yuuichi Sakai; Written by: Makoto Shinkai; English Language Version Written by: Clark Cheng; Animation Directors: Masashi Andô, Shunsuke Hirota, Ei Inoue, Kazuchika Kise, Masayoshi Tanaka, Kenichi Tsuchiya; Director of Photography: Makoto Shinkai; Editor: Makoto Shinkai; Music by: Radwimps; Art Directors: Akiko Majima, Takumi Tanji, Tasuku Watanabe
Japanese Voice Cast
Mone Kamishiraishi (Mitsuha Miyamizu); Ryô Narita (Katsuhiko Teshigawara); Aoi Yûki (Sayaka Natori); Nobunaga Shimazaki (Tsukasa Fujii); Kaito Ishikawa (Shinta Takagi); Kanon Tani (Yotsuha Miyamizu); Masaki Terasoma (Toshiki Miyamizu); Sayaka Ôhara (Futaha Miyamizu); Kazuhiko Inoue (Taki’s father); Chafûrin (Teshigawara’s father); Kana Hanazawa (teacher); Yuka Terasaki; Takashi Onozuka; Yôhei Namekawa; Miyu Tsuji; Shin’ya Hamazoe (Tanaka); Kanami Satô; Shinjirô Gôda; Yasuhiro Kikuchi
English Voice Cast
Michael Sinterniklaas (Taki Tachibana); Stephanie Sheh (Mitsuha Miyamizu); Kyle Hebert (Katsuhiko Teshigawara); Cassandra Morris (Sayaka Natori); Ben Pronsky (Tsukasa Fujii); Ray Chase (Shinta Takagi); Catie Harvey (Yotsuha Miyamizu); Scott Williams (Toshiki Miyamizu); Michelle Ruff (Futaha Miyamizu/Teshigawara’s mother); Marc Diraison (Taki’s father); H.D. Quinn (Teshigawara’s father); Glynis Ellis (Hitoha Miyamizu)
The EOFFTV Review 