Film Review: Your Name – 8/10

‘Treasure the experience. Dreams fade away after you wake up...’

Despite claiming to be a film buff, I know absolutely nothing about anime aside from the fact that it refers to animated movies produced in Japan. My ignorance is so pronounced that I don’t know for certain if Your Name is even considered anime. I think it is? It’s definitely animated. And it’s definitely a Japanese production from Japanese director Makoto Shinkai. The reason I chose this movie as my gateway into a vast and unknown genre is based purely on it’s incredible IMDB score. A rating of 8.4/10 puts it at #70 in the hallowed IMDB top #250. For context, that places it just above Aliens and The Dark Knight Rises

Taki and Mitshua are seemingly normal teenagers. The former lives in Tokyo and splits his time between attending high school and working part time in an Italian restaurant, while the latter is a high school girl in a small mountain town who dreams of leaving home. Things get weird when Taki and Mitshua begin to intermittently switch bodies.

A straight forward body swap movie then? Not quite. This is also a time slip movie that takes in time travel, metaphysics and hard sci-fi. Shinkai, adapting his own novel, wraps a deceivingly complicated plot around a simple premise. The result is a film that is occasionally mind-blowing, sometimes convoluted, but always gripping and unique. Beautifully animated and intricately written, Your Name is a film that deserves to have made a bigger splash in the consciousness of western film fans (although the upcoming American remake will hopefully go some way to addressing that). This is a film that often defies expectations with numerous jarring moments that purposefully disorient the viewer culminating in a saccharine conclusion that does feel somewhat earned despite the fact that it is toe-curlingly earnest.

I enjoyed Your Name a lot, and while I think it’s ranking in the aforementioned #250 is wildly out of proportion, Shinkai’s body swap fable made me more likely to dive into the world of anime than I was before.