Makoto Shinaki, director of fantasy-comedy-body-swap-romance-disaster-caper anime Your Name, has been described by several peers and critics as “The New Miyazaki”, a claim he himself downplays. It’s not a comparison I felt was especially accurate while watching this film, but that’s far more about the difference in themes than quality — this felt far more like a more mainstream Satoshi Kon, with some more typical anime elements. It’s a mind-bending, time-warping feast for the eyes with an epic sweep and two especially well-drawn leads. I mostly enjoyed the heck out of it, but I got a little disappointed as I went on that the first act’s brilliant meld of thematic material and genre fare didn’t stay consistent throughout.
After an arresting opening title sequence, we’re introduced to Mitsuha, a young girl stuck in a small town, who is somewhat of an outcast due to the public rituals she has to take part in for her family’s shrine, such as making a form of sake by spitting out chewed rice and allowing it to ferment. Yum. She expresses a wish to be a boy living in Tokyo, and the next day wakes up as exactly that, inhabiting the body of a quick-tempered student called Taki, while he wakes up as her (and immediately starts touching his boobs, because Japan). They realise what’s happening after a couple of these and begin to make rules for what each other can do, leave reports about their days in body-swap mode, and help each other improve their connections and relationships. This presents a unique, intriguing spin on the typical body-swap formula, with incredibly effective humour — including a joke about feminine verb usage that I admit took me a second to get as an Englishman. If you’re worried about spoilers, trust me — this barely covers half of the first act. It’s only when they decide to meet that the full story comes into focus and ramps up the scope.
The entire movie is absolutely gorgeous and fluid, with exquisite cinematography and art direction. It’s by far the best-looking anime I’ve ever seen, and showed me more than anything else how far the style has progressed from the “Japanimation LOL” days of 20 years ago. There is one moving, trippy scene around halfway through that is one of the prettiest things I’ve seen at the cinema in a while (and kinda puts Doctor Strange to shame, tbh). Perhaps the film’s biggest strength is its pacing — it’s lively and constantly engaging, with a storyline that almost never stops gaining momentum. The music, by J-pop band RADWIMPS, suits the spectacle of the film absolutely perfectly, adding to every scene in a noticeable way (although I admit the parts with vocals felt quite strange to me — a cultural thing, I’m sure), and the sound design helps add to the bombastic tone.
While the technical elements are second-to-none, they would have meant very little to me without any investment in the characters. Luckily, the script is excellent. Mitsuha and Taki are both likeable and strongly relatable, and you get a great sense of who they are from the contrast between them as themselves and them as each other. The supporting characters, while not developed very much, also feel very true-to-life, being far more than cardboard cutouts with just a few minutes of screen time each. The humour, meanwhile, works impeccably. Aside from the boob-touching thing becoming a running gag which gets tiresome quickly, the movie does an excellent job of balancing a consistent comedic, at times almost heist movie-esque tone with what is largely a serious, dramatic story. The only real exception here is one pivotal scene near the end, which is played largely for laughs for no real reason. There are also a handful of times when the script tells us something it could easily have shown — for instance, Matsuha’s early frustration with her small-town life.
As mentioned, the movie stays exciting and interesting throughout, dealing with heavy genre elements without ever becoming too obscure. On the surface level, it’s consistently awesome. However, the body-swap element of the first act brings up a lot of enticing thematic material which never really gets expanded on. The movie ruminates on being a male vs a female, contrasts city life with country life, and offers an interesting discourse on the nature of memory and the flow of time. But as more is revealed, it becomes more of a typical genre piece, and loses a lot of its initial depth. It’s still a very original film, but so many of the themes almost felt like window dressing. There’s one point where Matsuha’s grandmother mentions that her and her mother have also experienced the same body-swap issue, and it feels really important, but then it’s never mentioned again and it has absolutely zero impact on the rest of the movie. So much of the substance falls by the wayside once the fantastical elements come to the forefront, and while it doesn’t stop the movie from being entertaining and moving it also makes a lot of the initial concepts it brought up feel incidental. The ending isn’t super effective, either — it goes on for a little too long, and you can see the final scene coming a mile away.
While I have yet to see Moana and other potential surprises, Your Name is my favourite animated movie of 2016 so far. It didn’t quite do everything I was hoping it would, but just because it wasn’t a subtextual masterpiece doesn’t cancel out the fact that it’s an enthralling, amusing, mind-boggling ride with excellent character work and some of the best 2D animation I’ve seen in my life. I’ll be looking out for more from this guy.
