Your Name (Kimi No Na Wa) was an animated film written and directed by Makoto Shinkai. Following its release in 2016, it was a huge commercial success and received widespread critical acclaim. The film tells the story of two characters who switch bodies intermittently with each other some twist and turns along the way that differs it from most stories that feature body switching. The characters are Mitsuha Miyamizu, a girl from a small rural town of Itomori who longs for a life in Tokyo, and Taki Tachibana, a high school boy living in Tokyo. This review contains spoilers for the film.
The first section of the film, which focuses on them realizing and adjusting to body switching was lighthearted and pretty enjoyable. The good thing about it is that it doesn’t dwell too much on the process of them recognizing and adjusting to body switching unlike most other similar films and chooses to use a montage instead. The fast pace kept the comedic moments flowing so that even if some of those moments did not ‘hit’, there wasn’t enough time dwell on it before it moved to another scene. The problem for me was that I felt that it didn’t do a good job of establishing the relationship between the main characters. The mystery of what happened to Mitsuha and what made the body switching stop was also intriguing enough to carry the next section. The reveal that followed was a nice curve-ball and it actually caught me off guard. It is after this point that the story began to lose me because, as I said before, the relationship between the characters hadn’t been set up well enough for me to buy their romance. What little actual interactions they had through messages never felt like they carried any hints of romance and it wasn’t until after they had already been established to be in love did their interactions take a romantic turn. The two main characters weren’t particularly charismatic or interesting either and my lack of investment in the romance really weakened the enjoyment of the rest of the film. The next section was when it finally felt like the film had too many balls in the air and the resolution of the disaster subplot felt rushed. Despite my complaints about the romance, the final part of the film was surprisingly tense due to its similarity with another particular film.
The aspect of the film that gets praised the most are the visuals which are indeed excellent. As expected from Makoto Shinkai, the hyper-detailed art is beautiful to look at whether it is of dense and bustling Tokyo, sweeping scenery of Itomori or even the detailed interiors. He has a great eye of visuals and it really shows here.
The overall animation is also pretty good and there is a significant increase in the expressiveness of the character animation compared to Shinkai’s previous works. The body language and small gestures made by the characters really help sell the scenes where the characters had switched bodies. The characters were also well drawn and unlike his earliest works, they no longer stood out ‘flatly’ from the detailed backgrounds.
A noticeable difference from Shinkai’s earlier works was in the tone, which was much less moody and contemplative and instead placed a much larger focus on the plot and the character interactions, which themselves were good and often pretty funny. The dialogue flowed well and sounded natural most of the time, which is strange considering that I found the voice-overs and the monologues to be cheesy and overly melodramatic. The characters themselves weren’t particularly interesting but the premise and the plot did an acceptable job of carrying them. Mitsuha had some interesting things going for her with her desire to get away from her small town conflicting with her obligations to her family traditions as well as her relationship with her father. Taki, on the other hand, felt just flat and boring in comparison and it really felt that there could have been more done with his character.
Overall, the film was enjoyable but I couldn’t help feeling that there were some missed opportunities with and that Shinkai could have done much more. The various concepts and themes introduced could have been expanded upon, the relationship between the various characters could have been fleshed out, the characters could have used more depth and the romance could have been much more well executed. In the end, while it a polished and well made film, I didn’t find it to be as cohesive and well executed as ‘5 Centimeters Per Second’ or ‘The Garden of Words’.
“For me it’s incomplete, unbalanced. The plot is fine but the film is not at all perfect. Two years was not enough.” – Makoto Shinkai
