Your Name Review

Last year, a movie took Japan by storm, whether the director, Makoto Shinkai, was planning for it to be as big of a movie as it was or not, the Japanese animated film (typically referred to as Anime) caught the attention of Japan, and has become the highest grossing Japanese animated film in Japan, even beating out Spirited Away. The success also translated well into other countries in Asia. This is where it started to catch fire. I first heard about Your Name back in December, when a YouTube reviewer by the name of Chris Stuckmann talked about it. The poster caught my attention, at that point, I started to look into it and found a trailer and was stunned by what I saw, and at that point, this movie came onto my radar and I knew that I needed to see this movie as soon as I can.

I first saw one of Makoto Shinkai's films on Netflix back in 2011 entitled "The Place Promised in Our Early Days", not knowing anything about the director but the animation looking stunning. I can’t tell you anything about the story as I don’t really remember much about it, but what I can tell you is that the animation was really pretty to look at. With the release of Your Name drawing closer to US theaters, I decided to check out another of the director’s works, a movie called “The Children Who Chase Lost Voices”, and the one thing that really stunned me about the movie was just how amazing the animation looked for the movie, the coloring was just incredible.

That is the first thing that really drew my attention to Your Name, was just how stunning the animation looked, from the night skies to the landscapes, especially the scene near the end of the movie which I don't want to spoil here but it takes place on top of a mountain. The coloring and how the image comes together is just breathtaking, I really don’t know how else to put it. Plus there are a lot of great sequences of Tokyo and also the countryside, everything about the animation is just breathtaking. That alone is worth the price of admission.

 

Regardless, it’s not just the animation that really got me invested in the movie, but it was how the story and characters worked. I will lay out the basic premise of the story, it is about a teenage boy from Tokyo, Taki Tachibana, and a teenage girl from the countryside, Mitsuha Miyamizu, who randomly start switching bodies with one another, think of Freaky Friday. These two eventually learn about one another’s lives, and some crazy things happen as the movie progresses. This was one of those movies that I easily could have gotten on Wikipedia and read the entire plot and know exactly what was going to happen, but for some reason I stayed away from any major spoilers, and I am really glad I did, as the twists that took place in the movie really caught my attention, and made the journey for the two main characters way more interesting that I thought it was going to be. I became so invested that I sat there just waiting and hoping that Taki and Mitsuha will get together. I will not spoil the movie any further than what I have said, as I think it’s worth experiencing for yourself.

Another aspect of the movie that I really liked was the music, which was done by a band in Japan known as Radwimps, following pursuit of many popular musicians of bands that have composed for feature length films. The music by Radwimps is very nice to listen to and it helps to compliment the beautiful animation, and also the journey of these two characters. They even wrote a few songs as well. An interesting note, for the English dub, they re-performed the songs in English, which is something that really doesn’t happen when Anime is dubbed into English.

This movie got a limited release on April 7 in the US, and I am very glad it did and that I got to see this on the big screen, as I feel this is one of those movies that is worth making the effort to see on the big screen. I strongly recommend this to any fan of Japanese animated films, anyone that has any sort of interest, even if it’s very small. Heck, even if you are looking for a good animated film to see, I recommend checking this out.