Your Name. (2016)
Directed by Makoto Shinkai
High schoolers Mitsuha and Taki are complete strangers living separate lives. But one night, they suddenly switch places. Mitsuha wakes up in Taki’s body, and he in hers. This bizarre occurrence continues to happen randomly, and the two must adjust their lives around each other.
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10 films that influenced Your Name.
What critics say influenced Your Name.
In “Your Name,” that allows for the film’s most breathtaking moment: Like Richard Dreyfuss, carving Devil’s Rock out of his mashed potatoes in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” Taki has taken to sketching what looks like a giant round lake formed by the crater of a meteoric impact.
If any film has the right to be called this decade’s Spirited Away, it’s this one.
Much as Spirited Away opened up the vibrant Studio Ghibli brand to international audiences, writer-director Makoto Shinkai's animation hit Your Name lays down a fresh benchmark in terms of narrative and visual quality, as he shows us why he's been dubbed 'the new Miyazaki'.
Based on Shinkai’s own novel of the same name and reframing his usual fixations through the lens of Japanese history, “Your Name” is an unclassifiable experience that starts like a hormonal riff on “Freaky Friday,” morphs into an apocalyptic version of “Portrait of Jennie,” and somehow manages to layer a gender-swapping 12th century tale over the ongoing trauma of 3/11 in the meantime.
“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.
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Animated with a blend of gorgeous, realistic detail and emotionally grounded fantasy that make comparisons with Miyazaki not absurd, Shinkai’s films to date, including his 2007 break-through “5 Centimeters per Second” (“Byosoku 5 Senchimetoru”), display a sensibility more romantic than Miyazaki’s, with stories about young lovers instead of the maestro’s plucky young heroines on various sorts of quests.
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”.
Whether drawing lovestruck teenagers who move to opposite sides of Japan (“5 Centimeters Per Second”) or a girl who embarks on a journey into the land of the dead (“Children Who Chase Lost Voices”), each of the half-dozen films that Shinkai has made in the 14 years since has focused on young people who are consumed by the ache of separation.
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, Tenk?sei.
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, Tenk?sei.
First-rate Japanese anime is a taste that anyone can acquire in the time it takes to watch a film like this, and it should confirm Shinkai’s reputation to genre-lovers around the world, who know his poetry-inspired The Garden of Words.
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”.
In his fifth feature Makoto Shinkai (The Garden of Words, Children Who Chase Lost Voices) dives head-first into the offbeat yet insightful adventure that comes with literally putting his protagonists in someone else's place.
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An endearingly loopy mix of time-travel, body-swap, and disaster-movie ingredients that’s already a massive hit in its native Japan, this unconventional romance hails from the imagination of Makoto Shinkai , a talented up-and-coming animation director who launched his career with the ultra-indie “Voices of a Distant Star,” and who has dedicated himself to creating some of the country’s most stunning anime ever since.
Taking a cue from Haruki Murakami’s short story On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning, the auteur behind such aching romances as Voices of a Distant Star has fashioned a twisty, amnesiac, body-swap, eco-disaster, aching love story.
Makoto Shinkai’s first feature, Voices of a Distant Star, was about teenagers separated physically by a vast, unbreachable gulf while emotionally their closeness was all but unbearable.
His breathtaking 22-minute breakthrough, a homemade project called “Voices of a Distant Star,” lucidly illustrated Shinkai’s preoccupation with distance and how the immediacy of modern communication has had the perverse effect of clarifying our isolation from one another.
His earlier film, “Journey to Agartha” or “Children Who Chase Lost Voices,” is the single most beautiful animated feature ever made — and an obvious tribute to Miyazaki’s oeuvre.