Your Name (2016)

I don’t know what Makoto Shinkai has against me but for some reason his reviews always show up on my schedule precisely when I have the least time to write them. Maybe he heard that I don’t particularly like trains or weather.

“Bastard!”

Anyway, this is the third movie of his that I’ve reviewed and, while I didn’t really love either of his previous offerings things are at least trending positive. I liked The Garden of Words quite a bit more than 5cm A Second and I like Your Name quite a bit more than either of them. I appreciate that “I like it okay” is so muted a response to this particular film that it might as well be scathing critique but…I dunno guys, I don’t know what to tell you. Shinkai’s stuff just leaves me kinda cold. EDIT: I wrote this opener before rewatching the film and I’ve since warmed to it quite a bit, as you will see.

But yeah, this movie is a huge deal. It was the most successful non-Western animated film of all time when it released, unseating Spirited Away in its native Japan before going on to conquer most of Asia.

Here’s how it goes.

As Taki Tachibana awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect teenage girl. Taki is an ordinary teenage boy from Tokyo. He studies hard, has dreams of being an architect and works part-time as a waiter in an Italian restaurant. None of which explains why he’s now a girl.

The next day (and the movie actually does a piss-poor job of establishing this and I was very confused) teenage girl Mitsuha Miyamizu walks to school and learns from her friends, Tessie and Sayaka, that she was acting very strange the previous day, being dishevelled and unkempt and unable to even remember her name. Mitsuha has no recollection of that, but she does remember having strange dreams of living someone else’s life. Meanwhile, her teacher explains the origin of the Japanese word for twilight and explains that it’s traditionally a magical time when the borders between different worlds are weaker (I know that seems random but it pays off later).

So, let’s just avoid any confusion and put our cards on the table. It’s a Freaky Friday. Taki and Mitsuha are just randomly swapping bodies. However, this particular Friday is freakier than most, for reasons which shall become apparent.

Anyway, Mitsuha’s friends think that she’s just acting weird because she’s under a lot of stress. Mitsuha’s family are the guardians of the local shinto shrine, which means that as well as regular teenage girl shit she also has to carry out public religious rituals like making sake by chewing rice and spitting it out to be fermented. Also, her home life isn’t great. Her father abandoned the shrine to go into politics and is now estranged from the family and also the mayor of the town while Mitsuha lives with her grandmother and little sister. And to top it all off, Mitsuha is just sick of small town life. This is something the movie captures very, very well: The tedium of living in a place where all the shops close early, there’s nothing to do and where “going to a cafe” consists of sitting on a bench at a bus stop drinking coffee from a vending machine. It’s not exactly a thriving hub and the most interesting thing the townspeople have to look forward to is Tiamat, a comet that will be streaking overhead for the first time in hundreds of years and will be clearly visible from Earth.

So later, some of Mitsuha’s classmates see her performing the kuchikamizake ritual and she’s deeply embarrassed (as a former altar boy, this definitely rang true). Leaving the shrine she angrily calls out “I hate this town! I hate this life! Please let me be a handsome Tokyo boy in my next life!”

Well.

Lot to unpack there, obviously, but this honestly threw me a little. I assumed that this was supposed to be the moment that begat the Freaky Friday shenanigans, she makes a wish outside the shrine and then starts body swapping. But…the body swapping has already started before Mitsuha makes her wish. This is actually (I think) a clever little clue as to what is really going on here. Or, it could just be an editing fuck up. Anyway.

Mitsuha wakes up the next morning in the body of Taki and has to go to his school. I kinda feel this story wouldn’t work anywhere other than Japan, where having your soul swapped with a stranger is not considered an acceptable reason for taking a sickie. She also has to deal with having to pee in a male body which leaves her deeply shaken. I don’t buy this, honestly. Peeing as a guy is great. You get to pretend you’re a fireman.

After a rough start, Mitsuha meets Taki’s friends and enjoys spending time with them and experiencing Tokyo. She then does a shift at the restaurant he works at and helps Taki’s co-worker Miki by repairing her dress after a customer slits it with a pocket knife.

Taki and Mitsuha finally realise that this is really happening and they aren’t just dreaming. This kicks off an extended montage of the two trying to navigate this situation. They bicker at each other via notes left on their phones and slowly they start to improve each other’s lives. Thanks to Mitsuha, Miki is now interested in Taki because who doesn’t love a man who sews? And Taki’s more assertive nature makes her more popular at school. This whole sequence is sped through, which really surprised me because in your standard Freaky Friday this stuff would be the bulk of the film. But as I said, this is a significantly Freakier Friday than usual. Taki wakes up one morning to realise to his horror that Mitsuha has set him up on a date with Miki and he has like ten minutes to get ready.

During the date Miki realises that Taki seems like an entirely different person and assumes that it’s because he’s fallen in love with someone else and very classily bows out.

Taki is left alone on a bridge leafing through the mountain of notes Mitsuha left him to prepare for the date and one of them strikes him as odd: “by the time the date’s over, you’ll be able to see the comet”. He has no idea what that’s supposed to mean. For the first time, he actually tries calling her but can’t get through.

He muses that he’ll have to leave a note telling her how badly the date went for when they next switch. But the switch never comes. Days pass. Weeks pass. They never switch bodies again.

Finally, Taki decides to do something. He draws as much of Mitsuha’s village as he can remember from memory and travels across Gifu Prefecture trying to find it. He’s accompanied by Miki and his friend Tsukasa who think that he’s trying to find a girl that he met online. Their search is fruitless so they stop in a café where the waitress recognises one of his drawings as Itomori. And Miki and Tsukasa are shocked by that because Itomori was destroyed three years ago.

Yup. It was a time travel body-swap. The reason that Mitsuha hasn’t been answering her phone is because it, and her, and her entire community were incinerated when a fragment of comet split off and destroyed her entire town three years ago. Not saying that’s an excuse for ghosting someone, but it is at least somewhat understandable.

As his memories of Mitsuha start to fade he searches for Mitsuha’s family shrine and finds an offering of kuchikamizake that he left there while he was in Mitsuha’s body. He drinks it, which causes him to warp back in time into Mitsuha’s body. We learn that the day before Taki went on his date with Miki she (Mitsuha) realised that she was in love with Taki and went to Tokyo to find him. She did, but he didn’t recognise her (because from his perspective they hadn’t met yet) so she returned home heart-broken just in time for Itomori’s destruction.

Back in the past, Taki!Mitsuha talks to Mitsuha’s grandmother who reveals that body-switching is just something that her family can do.

“I spent most of the fifties as Milton Berle. I assure you, the rumours were true.”

Taki hatches a plan with Mitsuha’s friends to fake a bombing using some demolition charges that Tessie is able to steal from his builder father. The hope is that this will trigger an evacuation of the town before the comet hits. Unfortunately, the evacuation order has to come from the Mayor. Taki visits Mitsuha’s father and, would you believe, when told by his estranged daughter that he has to evacuate the entire town in an election year because she’s got a hunch that a one in a billion cosmic event is going to destroy everything he says “No”? I know right, what a dick.

Taki is crushed, feeling that the town is going to die and it’s all his fault. Suddenly, he has a moment of inspiration and races to the shrine.

Meanwhile, in the future, Mitsuha wakes up in Taki’s body and his horrified to see what’s become of the town. Twilight falls and, because it’s a magical time, Taki and Mitsuha are able to talk to and see each other. Now back in their own bodies, they share a brief tender moment and Taki suggests that they write each other’s names on their hands so that their memories don’t fade. Mitsuha is just about to write her name when twilight ends and she vanishes. Taki tries desperately to remember her name repeating over and over “your name is Mitsuha, your name is Mitsuha, your name…”

But it’s gone.

Back in the past Mitsuha is able to convince her father to order the evacuation and the town is saved. realising that her memories of Taki are fading she looks at her hand to see what he wrote, thinking it’s his name.

Onions. Shut up.

Years later, Taki is a university student in Tokyo, studying the Tiamat event, when an entire town was miraculously spared by a sudden evacuation drill. He passes a strangely familiar girl in the street. They turn and look at each other and he asks her if he knows her from somewhere. Tears in their eyes they both say the same thing.

“Can I ask you your name?”

***

This one took me a second watch to really appreciate. It’s not a movie that holds your hand and the various time travel shenanigans demand you play close attention. But it repays your time with interest. A beautiful, beautiful film.

Scoring

Animation 18/20

My old criticism of Shinkai is that his character designs are a little generic and that’s not not a problem here but there’s a definitely a vast improvement over 5cm a second. The backgrounds are gorgeous, meticulously detailed and brimming with atmosphere and ambience. And there are some absolutely jaw-dropping shots where the camera will pan around a room in a way that makes it look fully three dimensional while still traditionally animated. Amazing stuff.

Leads: 17/20

A wonderful main couple, their tendency to grope each when in each other’s bodies notwithstanding.

Villains: N/A

Supporting Characters: 16/20

Everyone is just so nice.

Music: 17/20

Japanese rockband RADWIMPS provide a great, atmospheric soundtrack.

FINAL SCORE: 72%

NEXT UPDATE: 03 October 2024.

NEXT TIME: You had me at “Cartoon Adaptation of Romeo and Juliet with seals animated entirely by one dude” because I’m weird like that.