YOUR NAME REVIEW: A touch of class brings this spirited anime to the screens…

Ever since the 1980’s, anime has slowly but surely crept into the American film market, with films like Akira and Ghost In The Shell blazing a path for the domestic debuts of the Studio Ghibli canon and other films.

Welcome aboard the anime express with Makoto Shinkai, whose breathtaking body-swap romance Your Name has us, the audience drooling for more. The director of this anime movie is so called the ‘New Miyazaki’, winner of multiple awards, and simply put, a genius mind.

Revisiting themes of longing and separation that became his signature in films such as 5 Centimeters Per Second (2007) and The Garden of Words (2013), Shinkai’s fifth feature has confirmed the writer-director as a major talent.

Shinkai Makoto is widely known for his animation style. He uses an enormous amount of details, and his art is so realistic it astounds Culturedemandsgeeks every time we see it. His stories mostly revolve around young lovers,

Here in Japan, the movie was advertised everywhere. Posters are still in convenience stores and retail shops. You can even find some in universities. But, unfortunately, in New Zealand, it was just not the case.

This heartbreaking YA adventure is very much its own beast from his outstanding imagination, as different from Miyazaki’s ageless Studio Ghibli animations as it is from live-action western romps such as Freaky Friday, The Hot Chick and It’s a Boy Girl Thing or, perhaps more pertinently, from Nobuhiko Ôbayashi’s 1982 Japanese hit, Tenkōsei.

We open with a meteor shower, on “that day when the stars came falling, like a dream… a shared dream”. In the remote mountain town of Itomori, high-school girl Mitsuha longs for another, more exciting existence. “Please make me a handsome Tokyo boy in my next life!” she pleads, while performing her Shinto temple duties, which include the kuchikami ritual of making sake with spit and braiding kumihimo cords, representing the strange interweaving of time and space, of gods and men.

One day, her wish comes true, as Mitsuha appears to awaken in Tokyo in the body of teenager Taki, a diffidently attractive young man who promptly starts to explore his “feminine side”.

Meanwhile in Itomori, Taki takes Mitsuha’s place, their spirits swapping back and forth at random, facilitating the need for smartphone messages to keep each other abreast of their oddly intimate adventures.

For a while, the peculiar arrangement proves a boon to both, with boy and girl learning about each other’s lives and subtly altering their own accordingly.

But something darker more disturbing lurks beneath this dazzling tale, with the spectre of a rainbow-colored sky threatening to fall upon the star-crossed couple who have become so close yet remain so distant.

Even more impressive is the fact that somewhere in the second act of Your Name, the film shifts from a romantic comedy to something almost completely different than advertised. What’s so special about this tonal shift is the fact that the movie doesn’t lose a step of momentum when it shifts gears.

As one can see on the posters, the anime focuses on a comet that appears once in a millennium.

The scene with the comet is probably one of the most beautiful, refined, and gorgeous pieces of animation we have ever seen in our life.

However, the beauty of the scene was that, despite its elegance, it was predicting a disaster, an end, a demise. This is exactly where Shinkai Makoto’s magic interferes and helps make things straight; it manages to overcome the tragedy.

Nonetheless, because of the disaster, the ‘red string’ that was connecting Taki and Mitsuha gets stretched and becomes forgotten in the flow of time and space.

But a thin memory, which is ready to melt away any moment, still lingers in the air, always radiant. It never fades away, never disappears, and it always guides them. It leads… to the string of connections.

ENGLISH OR JAPANESE?

As with any anime, Your Name will give you a choice on whether you want to experience the English voice dub, or the original Japanese with subtitles. For the purposes of this review, I watched the film with the English subtitles, and Culturedemandsgeeks had no problem following along with the action and the dialogue.

TOUCH OF CLASS:

Which is what the story plot and emotional focus touches upon. Taki and Mitsuha’s relationship is a long distance one, but not in the conventional sense that we know in the real world. While the body switching plot has been done before, nearly every trope of it has been subverted and the concept itself was inverted to make the subversions happen. Their relationship has its own definition and the twists that come along with it, something intangible but real like that of the fleeting comet in the star studded night sky

Shinkai Makoto is widely known for his animation style. He uses an enormous amount of details, and his art is so realistic it astounds me every time I see it. His stories mostly revolve around young lovers.

FINAL THOUGHTS:

As beautifully animated as it is emotionally satisfying, Your Name is a wonder to behold, a charismatic dialogue-filled thrill-seeking ride across boundless lives and time. If you are a teenager looking for a quick-fix YA dose seeking an-hour-and-a-half ride, then ‘Your Name’ will take you to another world.

The soundtrack matched up to the film perfectly too, whether it was the musical scores in the background or hearing Radwimps playing.

When we have movies like Your Name, you can forget about Disney movies. A good anime that has a message, interesting characters, authenticity despite retelling a niche sub-genre story. The work that has gone into and the originality is appreciated.

5/5 STARS