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Review: ‘Your Name’ Takes Adolescent Identity Crises to Extremes

By Manohla Dargis

• April 6, 2017

It isn’t until well into “Your Name,” a wistfully lovely Japanese tale about fate and time, that its two teenage characters meet. By that point, Mitsuha (a girl yearning to leave her small town) and Taki (a boy in Tokyo) have come to know each other as well as two people can. For reasons they don’t understand, each’s consciousness has been temporarily jumping into the other’s physical shell, only to jump back. This happens at night, which means that Mitsuha regularly wakes up in Taki’s body, and he wakes up in hers, a swap that he likes to confirm by fondling his (her) breasts.

As caressing goes, it’s about as clean a scene as it gets, partly because Taki is an anime character, which means that there’s a cartoonish quality to how his enormous, jewel-like eyes widen, and how patches of red bloom on his smooth cheeks. He’s embarrassed, and while you may laugh — in sympathy, in recognition or just because it’s a funny setup — his familiar anime look, his pert nose and pointy chin, as well as some of his expressions, put distance between you and him. The beauty of “Your Name” is that, as in the best animated movies, the thin black lines of the character design invariably dissolve, and all that remains are Taki and Mitsuha, thoroughly mixed-up teenagers.

There’s more to their confusion than they can fathom, which is understandable, given the trippy complications conceived by the film’s writer-director, Makoto Shinkai . “Your Name” is a body switching story, but it’s also about tradition and impermanence, disasters and destinies. For Mitsuha and Taki, there are other, more immediate concerns, like being profoundly alienated from the body each is actually inhabiting, which, of course, is another way to describe adolescence (and other maladies). The story opens just as Mitsuha awakens — or, rather, her physical body does — and a shocked Taki realizes that he’s crossed over an inexplicable rainbow. Meanwhile, back at his home in Tokyo, a horrified Mitsuha, now somehow in this boy’s body, registers that he/she has to use the bathroom.

Movies are filled with body snatchers and switchers, some malevolent and others benign, and ranging from science-fiction freakouts to Disney staples like “ Freaky Friday ,” about a girl and a mother swapping bodies and problems. A lot of these stories skew comic (body anxiety can be good for giggles), and they usually involve an outrageous exchange that turns into an exercise in radical empathy: Two people trade places, and each is forced to experience what the other does and feels. In a sense this kind of swap, even at its goofiest, evokes the transporting process of the fictional experience as we — viewers, readers and gamers — temporarily inhabit another being’s consciousness.

Mr. Shinkai plays with the obvious comedy of Mitsuha and Taki’s surreal changeover, and, as confusion gives way to a realization of what’s happening, they adjust. Mitsuha, delighted to find herself sometimes living in Tokyo, adapts surprisingly well to Taki’s body and, especially, his habit of visiting cafes (where she gorges on sweets, spending his money). There are tricky moments, too, like her unexpected, chaste flirtation with Taki’s female co-worker, who warms to his new “feminine” side. Other than Taki’s borrowed breasts (which he continues to enjoy in vaguely onanistic fashion), he mostly goes with the flow when he’s in Mitsuha’s body, sometimes with messy hair and manspreading.

It’s thoroughly charming and gently comic and, if Mr. Shinkai finally plays it safe about what it means for an adolescent boy and girl to trade bodies and lightly toy with gender, he complicates the story in other ways. Gradually, elements that at first seem like contextual details — a Shinto temple; a racing comet; and a traditional sake called kuchikamizake, fermented with the spit of a virgin — shift from background to foreground, becoming part of the body-switching story. It’s a narrative progression that at certain moments is echoed by the actual animation, as when the smudged, watercolorlike landscapes movingly overwhelm the cartoonish forms of Mitsuha and Taki.

By the time these two (and you) have figured out what’s happening, and why, Mr. Shinkai has set another change in motion, and “Your Name” has shifted from a comedy of confusion into a deeply moving meditation on nation, history, catastrophe and memory. It’s a touching, soaring switcheroo, one that Mr. Shinkai achieves with help from Masayoshi Tanaka, who did the character design, and Masashi Ando, the animation director and a veteran of Studio Ghibli. “Your Name” is being released in the United States in Japanese — Ryunosuke Kamiki voices Taki; Mone Kamishiraishi voices Mitsuha — and in an English dub. If possible, stick with the original.

Your Name Rated PG for catastrophic natural disaster. Released in two versions: in Japanese, with English subtitles, and dubbed into English. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes.

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Your Name review – a beautiful out-of-body experience

With this dazzling body-swap romance, Makoto Shinkai confirms his reputation as Japan’s new animation king

“I feel like I’m always searching for someone…” Ever since the animation legend Hayao Miyazaki announced (perhaps prematurely) that 2013’s The Wind Rises was to be his final feature, fans have been searching for a successor to his artistic throne. Last week, Miyazaki revealed that 2019 may in fact see the completion of a full-length version of his short-film project, Boro the Caterpillar . But in the interim, an heir apparent has emerged in the shape of Makoto Shinkai, whose breathtaking body-swap romance Your Name has dominated the Japanese box office for months.

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, duly dubbed “the new Miyazaki”. Yet this rip-roaring, heartbreaking YA adventure is very much its own beast, 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 .

Indeed, if you’re searching for a thematic touchstone, then the current Scandinavian release Girls Lost is probably a closer cousin, although Alexandra-Therese Keining’s intriguing teen-transfer fantasy seems drearily down to earth when compared with the wild flights of imagination that underpin Shinkai’s exuberant anime.

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 lurks in this dazzling tale, with the spectre of a rainbow-coloured sky threatening to fall upon the star-crossed couple who have become so close yet remain so distant.

Although its inspirations can be traced back to the late Heian-period tale Torikaebaya Monogatari , Your Name is a bristlingly modern affair with a J-pop soundtrack by teen favourites Radwimps and a mainstream cult sensibility that blends the fairytale charms of Hiromasa Yonebayashi’s 2014 adaptation of When Marnie Was There with the existential angst of Donnie Darko . The animation is thrilling, with the almost photo-realist views of Taki’s urban Tokyo life contrasting with the verdant hues of Mitsuha’s lakeside home.

Scenes of astral magic and natural disaster (an understandable preoccupation of Japanese cinema) lend a degree of spectacle that would put many live-action blockbusters to shame, while a hallucinogenic diversion into chalk pastel wonderment will transport even the most sceptical viewer to another realm.

Throughout, Shinkai juxtaposes male and female, town and country, science and superstition, past and present. But it’s in the twilight twinkling of kataware doki , when night and day meet and worlds old and new collide, that the real heart of this story lies. Like Chris Marker’s pioneering sci-fi La jetée (which inspired Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys ), Your Name spirals elegantly towards a point where beginnings and ends become indistinguishable, but does so more in the manner of a melancholy coming-of-age comedy than an abstract arthouse experiment.

For all its thematic complexities, there is plenty to laugh about too, from a recurrent gag about Taki being caught fondling “his” breasts while in the throes of a body swap, to the gentle teasings of Taki’s co-worker Ms Okudera, who seems more attracted to the transposed Mitsuha than to any awkward boy. Teen audiences in search of a “relatable” love story will find this every bit as accessible as Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet , while older viewers will delight in the way that archaic arts have become an integral part of 21st-century cinema.

Like the stories they tell, these moving pictures are a fusion of the ancient and modern. “Treasure the experience,” Mitsuha’s grandmother tells her sagely. “Dreams fade away after you wake up.” Not so this splendid movie, which will leave audiences in a heady reverie long after its mysterious light has faded from the screen.

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The Stunning Your Name Is a Poignant Body-Swapping Tale

Nobody can draw a cell phone like Makoto Shinkai. The animation director has been fixated on communication over time and distance since his breakout short Voices From a Distant Star, which follows a teenage intergalactic fighter pilot texting her would-be boyfriend from the cockpit during her off hours. Unlike many directors, Shinkai is not afraid to have his characters stare at their phones for long stretches, waiting for news, for reciprocation of feelings, for a connection. Though he paints them in hyperdetailed photo-realism, phones aren’t inert chunks of fiberglass to Shinkai, they are imbued with the hopes and desires and emotions of their owners. In Your Name , his latest film, one serves as both a record and a shared diary. They are a tenuous, hopelessly man-made tether whose connection could be severed at any moment.

Shinkai has been lauded as the “next Miyazaki” since his debut feature film The Place Promised in Our Early Days premiered in 2004. This anointment has seemed a little premature, if not outright unearned, to me, and unfair to Shinkai’s distinct point of view as a director. Shinkai’s trademark is his scenic work — he takes the lushly mundane background work of Ghibli films like Whisper of the Heart and My Neighbor Totoro and cranks up the resolution, offering frame after frame of hyperbolically detailed scenes of city and country life. Everything from a rain-speckled maple leaf to the scuffed edge of a carton of coffee is lovingly, perhaps even obsessively, rendered to look more real than real, and then lit in eternal magic-hour blues and golds bleeding across his bending skyscapes . Watch enough of Shinkai’s films and you start to recognize the meta-gravity in these details; you can feel Shinkai himself grasping to preserve the memory of every little thing in the periphery of his characters’ lives.

As dazzling as this can be, it’s not always been clear how Shinkai’s technique connects with his earnest teen romances. Shinkai’s blissful sunsets, combined with his cosmically emo screenwriting, has led me in the past to sometimes refer to his work as “Instagram anime,” heavy on feels and pretty pictures, light on complete thoughts. Still, his insistence on some common themes — adolescent longing, the wonders and loneliness of space, the idea that something is lost between your teen years and young adulthood — pointed toward a cohesive vision that had yet to fully emerge.

With Your Name , it’s suddenly, overwhelmingly here. Shinkai’s latest, which broke box-office records in Japan last year, brims over with ideas, its synapses firing faster and faster as its initial body-swapping scenario is bound up with notions of time, memory, and loss. It’s a film not just about the connection between a boy and a girl, but the way each of them connect to and relate to their world through their own eyes and each others. It’s only barely a romance, bypassing much of that familiar territory to explore something much more intimate and strange.

Mitsuha is a 17-year-old girl living in the rural village of Itomori; Taki is a 17-year-old boy living in Tokyo. After the appearance of a passing comet in the sky, they mysteriously begin swapping bodies, a day at a time and unexpectedly. They fumble through each other’s lives, and with each other’s bodies, with a mixture of horror and fascination. They begin leaving notes for each other, Mitsuha even sets Taki up on a date while in his body. They’re continually unable to contact each other, so when the swaps stop occurring, Taki travels to the mountains in search of Mitsuha’s home. That’s when the movie delivers its first wallop, which I won’t spoil here.

In the past Shinkai’s leads have tended to feel flatly animated and written. Not here. Taki and Mitsuha feel as vibrant and alive as their hometowns and the comet-strewn sky that hangs above them in all it psychedelic glory. Little details like the inherited rituals of Mitsuha’s life as a Shinto shrine maiden, and the cosmopolitan pleasures of a big stack of pancakes at the cafe Taki and his friends frequent, add up to a pair of perspectives that feel deeply lived-in.

Taki’s journey, to find a town purely through his own memories of it in Mitsuha’s skin, is the beginning of Shinkai’s sprawling inquiry into how places and objects attain meaning. In a way, Your Name is a kind of explainer for all those beautiful sunsets and meticulously recreated train stations and convenience stores. In a scene late in the movie, we see a grown-up Taki, pursuing a career as an urban planner, tell a potential employer that he wants to create “landscapes that leave heartwarming memories.” The translation is a little pat, but it has to do with the Japanese sense of natsukashii , a hard-to-translate word in the neighborhood of nostalgia. It has to do more with a kind of inherent longing; the fond recollection of past places and days is tied to the realization that you can never recapture them.

And what happens when those memories leave you? Taki and Mitsuha frequently find themselves waking up crying from dreams they can’t remember; throughout the film’s twisting timeline they alternately forget each other, or cross paths before meeting. Throughout it all, there’s a sense that the body and soul remember things the mind can’t; this leads the film to its perhaps improbably happy ending. Before then, though, things get tangly, and those trying to diagram Your Name ’s multiplying timelines might get frustrated. But Shinkai paints an assured emotional through line between all the metaphysical business, and as long as you follow it, you won’t be lost for long. What this film has to say about how we experience time and loss overpowers the demands of logic. Perhaps a less uplifting ending may have seemed more honest. But Shinkai’s a romantic at heart, and it’s infectious. By the end, you just want these two crazy kids to get together, no matter whose bodies they’re in.

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'Your Name' Review: A Modern Romance That Transcends Space, Time, and Tropes

Whether you're a fan of anime or not, 'Your Name' is not to be missed. Catch it in North American theaters starting this Friday!

If I told you that  Your Name ,  writer-director  Makoto Shinkai 's drama (originally titled  Kimi no na wa ), was an amazing anime that is sweeping the world thanks to its unconventional storytelling approach, gorgeous visuals, and tear-jerking romance, there's a good chance you'd only hear one word: anime. The word still carries a stigma today, even though the traditionally Japanese storytelling style has steadily become a part of Western culture over the last few decades.  Your Name is poised to be a gateway anime film for a whole new generation.

To be fair, some of the tropes that the anime genre has become known for are at play here: The story centers on two high school characters, the juxtaposition of technology and tradition is a big part of their journey, and the memory of a massively destructive event haunts the collective consciousness. However, these common themes found throughout anime exist in  Your Name to serve the story; everything else about it is unique and surprising. This makes for a refreshingly entertaining film that will have you invested in the fate of the charismatic leads as they struggle against seemingly insurmountable odds.

In the broadest sense,  Your Name is a story about two high school students, Mitsuha and Taki, who have never met but mysteriously begin to inhabit each other's bodies at random times, for random lengths of time, and with no memory of these events. So on the surface, it's an animated body-swapping comedy with romantic and dramatic elements. But it doesn't take long to realize that there is much,  much more going on in Shinkai's excellent adaptation of his own novel of the same name.

Mitsuha Miyamizu is reserved and hard-working, both as a student in school and at her family's shrine, where she learns the ways of tradition from her grandmother, alongside her little sister Yotsuha. The demands of tradition and the rather rural stylings of her small town frustrate Mitsuha to the point that she loudly voices her wish to be reborn as a handsome boy in Tokyo, a city full of culture, innovation, and opportunity.

Enter Taki Tachibana, a high school student living in Tokyo who doggedly pursues his interests, whether it's architecture or the affections of his co-worker, Miki Okudera. However, when Taki wakes up one morning to find himself in the body of Mitsuha--and, yes, after hilariously and rather innocently coming to terms with said new body--he finds himself on a path that is very different from the one he has been planning for all along.

To give too much away about  Your Name would be a disservice to audiences as it's best to go into this movie as cold as possible. It's much more than a body-swapping comedy; though that aspect is played up for laughs early on, it becomes crucial to the depths of the mutual understanding between Mitsuha and Taki by the story's end. And neither is  Your Name  only a traditional romantic story about two star-crossed lovers; those elements are there, as is the legend of the Red String of Fate connecting those destined to be together, but relationships develop slowly over time and are born out of understanding and compassion rather than simply overcoming a one-note conflict.

While  Your Name does come with the obvious supernatural element of body-swapping, there's a much deeper mythology at play that touches on the contrast between technology and tradition in the film. This is what  Your Name does exceptionally well: Introduce a familiar concept or trope, and then flip, twist, and invert it in surprising ways that will keep the audience guessing. You may see some of the twists coming, you might even guess the ultimate ending, but  Your Name remains an engaging story throughout and will have you emotionally invested in the fate of the fully fleshed out characters.

On that note, Shinkai's attention to detail and understanding of fans' obsession with character relationships is top notch. Viewers who keep an eye on supporting characters and their flirtations throughout the film will be rewarded with a rock-solid answer to their relationship by the movie's end, though the nature of that relationship may or may not please everyone. As for the relationship between the leads, Shinkai knows just how far to push an audience's patience for the "will they or won't they" game, and you can tell he's having fun teasing it along the way. Those slight sins are wholly forgiven since Shinkai also delivers one of the most earnest, intimate, and admirable romances in recent movie history.

And this is all without mentioning the breathtaking visuals on display, from the Tokyo cityscapes, to rural and urban train stations (another hallmark of anime), to lush and impressive natural landscapes, most of which are inspired by real-world locations . The character designs are charming and practical, far from the over-the-top appearances you might expect when hearing the word "anime." Heightening every emotional beat in the film is the fantastic soundtrack--which is destined to become a playlist in its own right--that occasionally breaks through to become the focus of a scene or sequence. It's honestly amazing to me that all the disparate parts of this film came together so well to make something this unforgettable; to miss it is inexcusable.

Your Name is a wonderful cinematic experience. You don't need to be an anime fan to enjoy  Your Name , just like you don't need to understand the historical and cultural significance of kuchikamizake to appreciate its place in the plot (though a familiarity with anime history and Japanese culture certainly helps). At the end of the day,  Your Name is a timeless crowd-pleaser that will have you laughing, crying, and loving right along with Mitsuha and Taki for years to come.

Your Name  opens in theaters, in limited release, starting Friday, April 7th.