Your Name
by Makoto Shinkai (based on his novel) and Clark Cheng (english script)
Amuse
Your Name is an anime film that has been a huge hit in Japan, China, and South Korea. You could watch it with a keen understanding of Japanese culture and Shintoism, both of which I lack. Or, you could watch it with two middle-school girls at the end of a very long day, with a solid case of PMS. The verdict from the girls: “The movie is pretty, but it’s very confusing.”
The first part of Your Name is a romantic comedy version of Freaky Friday. Mitsuha lives in Itomori, a small town in the countryside. It’s a beautiful but boring setting for a teen, especially a teen who feels pressured to live up to the expectations of various family members.
Mitsuha wishes she were a boy living in Tokyo. When she falls asleep, she wakes up in the body of Taki, a teenaged boy living in — you guessed it — Tokyo. In Itomori, Taki wakes up in Mitsuha’s body. When they fall asleep, they switch back, and so on. Gradually the two work out a system of leaving journal entries on each other’s phones. Taki helps Mitsuha deal with bullies at school and Mitsuha helps Taki get a date.
It’s weird, but fine, until they realize that they can’t call each other (“This phone is out of service”). This is the first sign that things are seriously awry.
Eventually Taki makes a discovery that I will not reveal. This causes the movie to change tone, becoming in turns a mystery movie and a disaster movie. There’s a lot of running and strategizing and freaking out. There happen to also be several heart-rending moments in which characters yell, “WHAT’S YOUR NAME!”
These moments are probably more touching when you don’t have a middle-school girl next to you whispering “ALEXANDER HAMILTON!”
I went in with almost no idea of what the movie was about. Since it has some powerful twists and turns, I’m not going to spoil the plot. I will say, though, that the funny parts are very funny and the suspenseful parts very suspenseful. Periodically Taki and Mitsuha lose their connection and begin to forget each other. These sequences are horrifying and heartrending as they try to hold on to a wisp of memory of “something precious – something I don’t want to forget.” The more fragile the relationship seems to be, the more heavily the participants and the viewer invest in it.
I suspect that this movie would benefit from multiple viewings. For one thing, the plot is not entirely linear. It’s told from different points of view, and there are time skips of several years. However, it’s not as confusing as my teenaged review team suggests. I’m pretty sure I followed it, and with one more watching I’d have it down. In addition to helping make sense of the timeline, multiple viewings would show off a lot of facets and clues – you can tell the movie is layered with details, too many to catch at once.
The themes of “union” are powerful, and the characters feel real, but the standout quality of this movie is how incredibly beautiful it is. Itomori is a town on a mountain, surrounded by forest, with a lake that is shown at different times of day in all kinds of lighting. Tokyo pales in comparison – but there are details like the blinking lights on a crane and the food in a café that are just lovely. The use of light and space, geometry and shape, reinforces the ideas about the importance of connection in a cosmic sense. There’s a contrast between the small people and the big world that makes connections between people seem more, instead of less, important. See this on the big screen if you can!
Some American viewers may think of anime as an art form involving science fiction and action and fanservice, all of which I enjoy considerably. However, Your Name is an example of an anime that is a character-centered drama with just a touch of the mystical. There are no overt fantasy or science fiction elements except for the body switching. There’s no sex, although Taki’s reaction to waking up as a girl is, inevitably, to start squeezing his/her breasts which gets more and more hilarious every time he wakes up and is inevitably caught by Mitsuha’s little sister. It’s a sweet, sometimes tragic, sometimes happy love story about two very confused teenagers growing up in a beautiful but sometimes catastrophic world. It’s geared towards adults but other than some language there’s nothing inappropriate for children.
Just keep in mind that they will probably react like this:
Your Name is in theaters now and tickets (US) are available at Fandango and Moviefone.
I really enjoyed it, although I had read enough reviews that hinted at the twist I figured it out while I was watching. Maybe for that reason, I found the last part dragged a bit and I got a bit impatient.
But it was, hands down, one of the most beautiful movies I have ever seen. Some of the Pixar movies might be above it, but it would be close and I have never seen a more beautiful anime movie.
I also loved that there was a lot of cultural detail and subtle emotional stuff going on. It felt like a novel.
@Jill Q – It’s actually based on a novel (which, sadly, doesn’t appear to be available in English).
This sounds so good! But before I decide to watch it, I have to ask the ultimate spoilery romance reader quwstion:
Is there an HEA?
(I avoid sad endings and have been burned by anime before.)
@JoS – The ending is a little ambiguous but HEA is definitely a possibility! Personally, I chose to interpret it as a HEA.
I watched this on a plane last week and really enjoyed it! I agree – one of the most beautiful animated films I have ever seen. I definitely recommend it.
Great review! I LOVED this movie. I watched it on my flight to Tokyo (first trip to Japan) which made it so special.
To JoS: I think this film dovetails really well with Romance readers– you’re safe to watch it **wink**.
I honestly can’t recommend it enough– it was sweepingly epic at times, funny, played with gender bending in a really satisfying way, you have the city… the country… familiar yet exotic… gosh makes me want to watch it again!!
Thanks for the reassurance, guys. Looking forward to watching this!
These moments are probably more touching when you don’t have a middle-school girl next to you whispering “ALEXANDER HAMILTON!”
Excellent review, made perfect by this line.
The Alexander Hamilton reference made me chuckle! Thanks for the review, Carrie.
You had me at “ALEXANDER HAMILTON!” Have to watch it now!
I really loved this one too! I loved the ending and thought it was lovely (but I like ambiguous endings anyway). I would say that wider experience with other stories that frequently swap POV’s and locations (which naturally grows with age) is what will mostly eliminate confusion except where the plot is deliberately keeping you in the dark on a point or two. 🙂
As a lifelong anime fan, I came into this movie with a different set of expectations, and it blew me away. The boy/girl body-switching trope is a standard of comedy and rom-com anime, and at first it looks like you are going into a very light movie, which is why the sucker-punch to the gut halfway through the film hits so much harder and is such a shock. (I literally sat straight up and gasped -not just at the big reveal but in several places- and I can’t remember the last time a movie did that to me.) It’s quite subversive in terms of anime plotting, and the way it plays with nonlinear time reminded me of Arrival. I appreciated Taki and Mihasu’s very logical decision to communicate and help each other navigate each other’s lives, and the creative ways they found to do so. I do recommend seeing it more than once to pick up on all the small details, and it does help to know something about Japanese culture (for example, the red ribbon Mihasu manages to give to Taki symbolizes that they are connected by fate.) @ JoS, I personally found it a very romantic movie on several levels and I don’t think you will have too much of a quibble with the ending. 😉 I personally thought it was an exceptional film and I’m looking forward to grabbing the DVD when it comes out.
Also, it’s very important to make sure you see the subtitled version and not the dubbed version. A lot of very important information gets lost in translation in the dubbed version, so it makes less sense and a lot of the tension is lost.
This is a great review! Thank you. Definitely going to look for this.
My family loved this movie, we are big anime fans. I 100% agree with EC Spurlock. See the subtitled version (first).
Does anyone know if, when this movie becomes available as a DVD, it will be a dubbed version or subtitled version?
Coming super-late to the party here to say thanks for putting this movie on my radar. I just watched it, and absolutely loved it.
I know next to nothing about anime, so I had no genre expectations, but I do know just enough about the Japanese language to suspect that the translation of the title loses a subtlety of the original. A literal translation of “WHAT’S your name?” would be several levels of rude Japanese, since both applying “what” to a person and using “you” at all are both a bit crude. Both characters use the standard idiom which is best expressed in English as “your name?” with a rising inflection of the voice to show that it’s a question. So the title of the movie (Kimi no namae wa or Anata no namae wa) plays on the fact that it is only tone of voice (but not actual words) that distinguishes the moments of great triumph, when Mitsuha and Taki shout “Your name is…!” and greatest sorrow and loss when they ask “Your name is….???”
The other thing is the use of “you” which is generally avoided in Japanese, since it is considered discourteously direct. (Using someone’s name is highly preferable. For example, for those who’ve seen the movie, Taki never says something like “would you like to go out?” to Ms. Okudera. Instead he says – appropriately – “would Ms. Okudera like to go out?” TO her, since otherwise he’d be quite rude.) However, like most languages except English, Japanese does have varying levels of formality for the word “you” if it must be used at all. (When I said the title “Your Name?” had two possible transcriptions, it’s because it uses the kanji for “you” which can be read as either anata or kimi depending on context.) Since “formal” speech is also gender coded as “feminine” speech (or rather, women are not supposed to be informal), I think that Mitsuha uses the formal “anata” throughout. Without going into spoiler territory, there are times when Taki also uses “anata” when he says “your name?” but also a few times when (very movingly) he uses the less formal “kimi.” Because “kimi” is roughly the equivalent of “tu” in the Romance languages, using it with someone whose name you don’t know is unusual, and using it to ask someone’s name is both ironic and very intimate.
Caveats that I’m not fluent in Japanese and that I studied it a long time ago, and haven’t tried to listen to or read it in years, but I’m pretty sure of all of the above. (Native or near-native speakers feel free to correct me.)
Also, I’d have to watch it again and pause the film to read the kanji, but I think the name “Itomori” means something like “Forest of Threads” or “Threadwood” which is certainly appropriate.
Anyway, thanks again for the tip about a wonderful movie. And yes, I’d say the ending is super-romantic.
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