Anime The musician of the heartstrings plays another masterpiece...
Makoto Shinkai... what a modern master. By this stage he simply HAS to rate alongside Hayao Miyazaki and the late great Satoshi Kon as one of the greatest anime film creators of all time. Your Name may lack the simple, pure perfection of Voices of a Distant Star and The Garden of Words and it has very clear, obvious flaws that you can easily pick up on... but Shinkai tells emotional dramas so well that you can simply disregard them and come out the end knowing you've seen a truly great movie.
I mean, the flaws are pretty obvious, albeit not glaring. The "opening sequence" simply doesn't belong- anime TV and OAV series have opening music videos, not movies. Parts of the pacing felt off- the montage of Taki and Mitsuha's body-swapping lives with the accompanying Exposition Dump felt FAR too rushed compared to the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue ending sequence that felt a bit too padded. Although now that I mention it, pacing problems are something I've increasingly come to notice in a LOT of anime films, particularly those that tell a story over an extended period of time (I noticed it in The Boy and the Beast as well). And it really feels like there was a lot of story missing in relation to Mitsuha's father, he feels like an important character who had a lot of his screen time cut out, leaving him feeling somewhat shallow.
But the rest of the movie is just so brilliant. The concept of falling in love with someone you only know second-hand. The absolutely shocking reveal half-way through the film that blindsides you and changes what you thought was a simple rom-com into a tense and gripping mystery-drama. The careful Foreshadowing that helped set up what might have otherwise turned out as a series of Ass Pulls, leading to a powerful and satisfying climax. And an incredible testament to The Power of Love that transcends everything, the story Makoto Shinkai tells better than anyone else.
What more is there to say except that it's another brilliant work from possibly anime's greatest auteur? A wonderful film.
Anime Pleasant Yet Forgettable
Less than an hour after finishing Your Name, I struggled to recall the name of the male lead despite knowing it starts with a "T" and has two syllables. Was it Tachi? Toka? I had to check online to remember it was Taki. I wasn't unhappy, but this experience is a good summary of Your Name's impact.
Our protagonists Mitsuha and Taki are two generically attractive and friendly high school anime protagonists whose paths cross when they realize they take control of the other's body several times a week as they sleep. In turn, they have no memory of the days when their own body is taken over and communicate with each other through Note To Selves.
The problem is that nothing much actually happens with this. The first half of the film is a story with no conflict and no real goals. Our protagonists don't do anything particularly interesting with their power, nor do they face any real challenges to overcome. Mitsuha and Taki don't seem to be troubled at all by losing so much of their lives to the control of someone else, nor do they show any interest in investigating the phenomenon that brought them together. The two are content to live out each other's lives while they giggle and groan about the minor faux pas committed in their body. The result is that our protagonists don't give us much reason to root for them beyond the fact that they're nice.
It's only in the second half that a real conflict arises as a disaster looms, but this has problems of its own. The story doesn't firmly establish the rules of what Mitsuha and Taki can do with their powers, so it fails to build much tension because it's not clear what the winning and losing conditions are. The disaster is addressed without much of any teamwork or cooperation, just the two swapping places in Mitsuha's body. Not only that, but the act that resolves the problem takes place entirely off-screen.
Your Name really isn't a very emotional story. Despite the attempted theme of love transcending space and time, our protagonists have two minutes of conversation with each other, dominated by Mitsuha calling Taki a jerk and a pervert and Taki submissively apologizing. The film features several anime-opening-style songs whose melodramatic lyrics feel rather unearned.
That said, while Taki and Mitsuha are not incredibly interesting, neither are they disagreeable. I would probably lose interest if this had been a series, but the story gave me enough for me to stick with them for the length of a movie. Like most modern anime films, the animation is fantastic, particularly one sequence of the sky and clouds, and the ending ultimately left me satisfied. There were some details I quite liked, such as Mitsuha sitting like a girl in Taki's body, an oddity I recognize immediately but could never consciously articulate.
If you have two hours to kill, Your Name is a perfectly decent if unremarkable film. Just don't expect to remember anyone's name in the morning.