Critics reviews

Shinkai's film is structurally similar to Kei Horie's teen melodrama on love and memory, Forget Me Not, and bears some of the same heartbreaking effects as Johnnie To's Romancing in Thin Air, proving once and for all that the best melodrama is coming out of Japan these days.

This wondrous movie from writer/director Makoto Shinkai starts off as a humorous comedy of errors before it becomes an apocalyptic clock-stopper with much more than impressing the cute girl at stake. Beautifully animated (we're talking Studio Ghibli standards here), Your Name captures that sensation of waking up from a dream you wish lasted longer, or misplacing a name that's still warm on your tongue, but has just departed.

And now for something more popular... Your Name is a perfect introduction for the anime-newbie, cannily weaving together so many of the genre's tropes—an apocalyptic event with a high school innocently built into the middle of its path, teenagers who are the only ones willing to accept that everything can be swept away in an instant, a love that defies the rules of time and space, and, of course, a few shots up skirts.

The film's sense of wonder owes something to traditional Shinto beliefs. Not only do Shinto rituals factor prominently in the plot, but Your Name takes a brief pause from its story to explain a Shinto belief about the union of different elements within the human body. There's a palpable spiritual presence in Your Name that elevates the love story... Body swapping and romance come to seem like two sides of the same coin—Your Name presents both as miraculous.

Shinkai has been heralded as the next Miyazaki (to his discomfort), though it doesn't feel like a Miyazaki movie at all... Its central celestial event, the comet, is rendered from multiple points of view in breathtaking fashion, streaking across the sky with a prismatic loveliness that underscores the incident's importance before we ever understand it. It's a teen movie not just in terms of its characters, but in the way it summons the feeling of every emotion brimming over.

In many ways this is an old-fashioned movie, exquisitely attuned to the dualism of mind and body, male and female, that strike deep roots in Japanese art and literature down the centuries... With its gods and extra-real dimensions, its staccato beat of memory and forgetting that guide the journey, Your Name shimmers with the magic of a fairy tale, yet also has its feet firmly planted on the ground of Japan's past and present.

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.

There's admittedly a certain pleasure in the deft fake-out that Shinkai executes here—most viewers will automatically make an assumption that's ultimately proven wrong—but it comes at the cost of overall narrative incoherence. Thankfully, Your Name is consistently gorgeous to look at, marrying traditional anime character design to stunning, not-quite-photorealistic backdrops.

The most beautiful anime since Patema Inverted, with which it shares themes about the difficulties of personal connections as represented by inexplicable cosmic phenomena. If Shinkai's picture goes for the obvious gag of Taki-in-Mitsuha's-body fondling Mitsuha's breasts a few too many times — for her part, Mitsuha is appropriately disgusted by Taki's body's penis — Shinkai at least has the taste to hang a lampshade on the joke, and it takes nothing away from the heartfelt splendor of Your Name.

Even at its most outrageously bizarre, Your Name is bound together by an ardently romantic core. The film is one of the strangest-ever articulations of déjà vu... Your Name may in the end be a mess of storytelling, but it's a passionately beautiful one nonetheless.

Is there a name for that thing where you're watching a film and having a jolly old time with it, and then at about the mid-point it just crashes and burns? Like, from out of nowhere. The fun quotient instantly dries up, and you're left to clock-watch for the annoying remainder. The animated romance Your Name by Japanese director Makoto Shinkai is one such movie.

Shinkai has retained the vibrant colour palette and fluid movement of [The Garden of Words], creating ravishing landscapes of verdant countryside or Tokyo's shimmering skyscrapers. Their juxtaposition with careful, photorealistic close-ups of a door swishing open or a phone screen scrolling give the characters a rich, grounded presence... [The film] eloquently and elegantly expresses not only teen confusion but also the tensions between old and new Japan.