It isn’t until well into “Your Name, ” a wistfully lovely Japanese tale about fate and time, that its two teenage characters meet. By that point, Mitsuha (a girl yearning to leave her small town) and Taki (a boy in Tokyo) have come to know each other as well as two people can. For reasons they don’t understand, each’s consciousness has been temporarily jumping into the other’s physical shell, only to jump back. This happens at night, which means that Mitsuha regularly wakes up in Taki’s body, and he wakes up in hers, a swap that he likes to confirm by fondling his (her) breasts.
As caressing goes, it’s about as clean a scene as it gets, partly because Taki is an anime character, which means that there’s a cartoonish quality to how his enormous, jewel-like eyes widen, and how patches of red bloom on his smooth cheeks. He’s embarrassed, and while you may laugh — in sympathy, in recognition or just because it’s a funny setup — his familiar anime look, his pert nose and pointy chin, as well as some of his expressions, put distance between you and him. The beauty of “Your Name” is that, as in the best animated movies, the thin black lines of the character design invariably dissolve, and all that remains are Taki and Mitsuha, thoroughly mixed-up teenagers.
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There’s more to their confusion than they can fathom, which is understandable, given the trippy complications conceived by the film’s writer-director, Makoto Shinkai. “Your Name” is a body switching story, but it’s also about tradition and impermanence, disasters and destinies. For Mitsuha and Taki, there are other, more immediate concerns, like being profoundly alienated from the body each is actually inhabiting, which, of course, is another way to describe adolescence (and other maladies). The story opens just as Mitsuha awakens — or, rather, her physical body does — and a shocked Taki realizes that he’s crossed over an inexplicable rainbow. Meanwhile, back at his home in Tokyo, a horrified Mitsuha, now somehow in this boy’s body, registers that he/she has to use the bathroom.
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Movies are filled with body snatchers and switchers, some malevolent and others benign, and ranging from science-fiction freakouts to Disney staples like “Freaky Friday, ” about a girl and a mother swapping bodies and problems. A lot of these stories skew comic (body anxiety can be good for giggles), and they usually involve an outrageous exchange that turns into an exercise in radical empathy: Two people trade places, and each is forced to experience what the other does and feels. In a sense this kind of swap, even at its goofiest, evokes the transporting process of the fictional experience as we — viewers, readers and gamers — temporarily inhabit another being’s consciousness.
Mr. Shinkai plays with the obvious comedy of Mitsuha and Taki’s surreal changeover, and, as confusion gives way to a realization of what’s happening, they adjust. Mitsuha, delighted to find herself sometimes living in Tokyo, adapts surprisingly well to Taki’s body and, especially, his habit of visiting cafes (where she gorges on sweets, spending his money). There are tricky moments, too, like her unexpected, chaste flirtation with Taki’s female co-worker, who warms to his new “feminine” side. Other than Taki’s borrowed breasts (which he continues to enjoy in vaguely onanistic fashion), he mostly goes with the flow when he’s in Mitsuha’s body, sometimes with messy hair and manspreading.
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. It’s a narrative progression that at certain moments is echoed by the actual animation, as when the smudged, watercolorlike landscapes movingly overwhelm the cartoonish forms of Mitsuha and Taki.
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By the time these two (and you) have figured out what’s happening, and why, Mr. Shinkai has set another change in motion, and “Your Name” has shifted from a comedy of confusion into a deeply moving meditation on nation, history, catastrophe and memory. It’s a touching, soaring switcheroo, one that Mr. Shinkai achieves with help from Masayoshi Tanaka, who did the character design, and Masashi Ando, the animation director and a veteran of Studio Ghibli. “Your Name” is being released in the United States in Japanese — Ryunosuke Kamiki voices Taki; Mone Kamishiraishi voices Mitsuha — and in an English dub. If possible, stick with the original.
Rated PG for catastrophic natural disaster. Released in two versions: in Japanese, with English subtitles, and dubbed into English. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes.
A version of this article appears in print on , Section C, Page 5 of the New York edition with the headline: An Adolescent Awakening in Another Body. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | SubscribeWe use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from. To learn more or opt-out, read our Cookie Policy. Please also read our Privacy Notice and Terms of Use, which became effective December 20, 2019.
Your Name Box #01 03 (manga) : Kotone, Ranmaru, Shinkai, Makoto: 9788832750904: Amazon.com: Books
Focuses on two characters and their intimate, although not sexual, relationship they have with one another. Taki, a teenage boy from Tokyo, and Mitsuha, a teenage girl from rural Japan, wake up one day to discover they have switched bodies. Unlike other films that use the same premise, Taki and Mitsuha go back and forth, alternating between waking up in their own bodies or waking up in the other. It’s because of these circumstances that the two develop a friendship, which then blossoms into romantic feelings. Everything seems like it might work out for these lovestruck teens stuck in a weird, fantastical predicament.
Except they never “meet.” They never get to really hold each other. They’re bound to this faint memory of an intense emotion they shared with each other, but they can’t remember the other person’s name as time goes on. They can’t remember what the other person looks like. As much as they want to, they can’t be together.
: the experience of longing. It’s a challenging emotion to contend with. It’s a subtle ache, like a dull headache on a rainy, gloomy day. It doesn’t take over your life, but it’s noticeable. Some days, it’s more noticeable than others. You want to chase the longing, but you also know you have to move on with your life. You create this stalemate for yourself and deal with the emotional throbbing that comes with longing.
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Anyone who has ever had a crush, been in love or, in my experience, has lost a great love, knows what longing is. It’s that moment when you hear a song that reminds you of that person and you feel that small tightness in your chest. It’s that moment a friend casually mentions they ran into said person and your heart flutters with the memories of when it was good. You long for those moments. You romanticize them. Even though it can never be, or it feels like it can never be, you cling to it.
Longing, in many ways, is more addictive than any other part of a relationship because it exists partly due to fantasy. You long for the fantasy of what could be, not the actuality of what the relationship was.
, five years after Mitsuha and Taki have their intense moment, they’ve each gone their own separate ways. Both are living in Tokyo, but they have their own friends, new careers and are going about their day-to-day lives. Still, there are scenes when Taki and Mitsuha are on the train and they see something that, for a quick second, reminds them of the memory they shared with that persona. A red band that Mitsuha used to tie her hair, for example.
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In that exact moment, they’re frozen, gripped by this overpowering sense of longing they have for the future that could have been. Sitting in the theater, watching it play out before me, I could feel myself getting emotional. I blinked hurriedly to stop any tears from escaping, not wanting to be that person, but it was the most effective use of longing I’ve ever seen in a movie. The look on Taki’s face when he believes he’s found the person he’s been longing after for five years is ubiquitous.
We all long for something. It can be a person, or an experience or a milestone, but it’s a shared human experience. That ache in our chests is a feeling that doesn’t need to be described because we can pinpoint to the exact moment in time we’ve felt it. For some, that could be a few months or weeks ago. For others, it could have just happened.
. Taki and Mitsuha don’t spend their five years planning
