Your Name (2016)

 

Your Name (2016)

7/10

Starring the voices of

Ryunosuke Kamiki

Mone Kamishiraishi

 

Directed by: Makoto Shinkai

 

The anime Your Name is a very good film. I’ll be honest, I was not hooked from the start the way I expected myself to be, as the pacing starts slow. The body swapping and what they did in each other’s bodies were not well detailed enough for me to catch interest, but I continued to watch, and I was glad I did. The moment we got to the point where we discover that they are three years apart, the pacing picked up, and so did my interest.

The anime changed gear around halfway in, and now we are trying to see how to make these two be around the same time to meet. There are so many clues dropped along the way about their paths crossing at one point, you just have to watch until it all comes together.

The anime is about two people, Mitsuha, a high school girl from Itomori, and Taki, a high school boy and part-time waiter from Tokyo. Both intermittently switch bodies, and when they wake up back in their normal bodies, we see the difficulty they have in tracking what the other has done.

This body-switching thing is not explained in detail, it seems to happen on Mitsuha’s side of the family, but the ambiguity is one thing I like about the anime. It’s a phenomenon that just happens, so deal with it.

They start to leave notes for one another and set ground rules on how to behave so they can keep track of things, then all of a sudden it stops. So Taki decides to go find Mitsuha and realizes that he doesn’t know where she lives. Using drawings from memory, he tracks her rural area down, only to discover that nobody is there anymore. Then he realizes she was living three years behind him.

Now he’s bent on finding a way for them to meet. How the writers handled the situation to make this happen may not be the best writing I’ve seen, but I guess they wanted to add some mystic feel to the crater scene when both were there at the same time three years apart and also create a happy ending. I think I would have loved it more if the anime had gone with a never meeting flow, where each changed the other’s life and they moved on separately. I guess I’m just sad like that.

Your Name has fantastic animation, wonderful voice work, and handles its character development very well. It was suggested to me on TikTok, and I’m glad I watched it. I recommend that you do too.