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Country bumpkin Mitsuha wants nothing more than to live in Tokyo. There aren’t any fancy cafes in her isolated hometown, her estranged dad is running for mayor, and the other girls bully her for being the local shrine maiden. Her wishes are unexpectedly granted one day, when she wakes up in a city apartment—and in a boy’s body. It wears off at bedtime, feeling just like a strange dream she had by the next day, but then it starts happening two or three times a week. As it turns out, this switcheroo is mutual. Mitsuha and the boy, Taki, exchange instructions for living each other’s lives and try to make the best of their situation. However, it soon becomes clear that they’ve been brought together for a specific purpose. As the mysterious comet Tiamat approaches, time may be running out.
. That’s not to say that his previous work has been bad. It’s just been a bit aimless, repetitive, or overwhelmed by a tendency to wallow in his signature aesthetic. I’ve been following his career since I first saw
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In the mid-2000s, and for a long time, my opinion of him hadn’t changed much. He’s great at production design – particularly his trademark hyper-detailed backgrounds – and evoking a particularly wistful sense of melancholy. But while he’d been improving as a writer (
It was blowing up the Japanese box office, and my friends lucky enough to access advance screenings kept coming back with glowing reviews. I sat through the chatter impatiently – the film wasn’t out early in my area, and I could hardly jump on a plane to Japan just to see a single movie. I wanted to know why people – including longtime Shinkai skeptics like me – were being converted by this unexpected megahit.
Luckily, I got to see the film early for review purposes, just short of its April 7th release date stateside. Without spoiling anything for those still waiting, and after what’s felt like ages of unending hype, I can now report that
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Lives up to all the brouhaha. This is the best anime blockbuster that I’ve seen in years – a gorgeous, tightly paced and scripted piece of artistry that manages to be about something more than Shinkai’s usual hobby horses. That’s not to say that his voice is absent – there’s enough star-crossed love, lush scenery, and celestial imagery to make it clear that this is his project absolutely – it’s just that he’s finally managed to tie all this into themes that truly complement the cosmic scale of his sentimentality.
Is a perfected version of the story that Shinkai has spent his entire career telling, an instant mainstream-ready classic in the vein of
Now that I’ve gushed about the film like everyone else, it’s time to get to the brass tacks of what its themes are trying to achieve. Over the course of my acquaintance with Shinkai’s oeuvre, I’ve seen him obsess over certain story beats, in particular the idea of bonds that transcend time, space, and emotional state. Every single one of his films has been dominated by plaintive yearning for both a relationship and period of life that’s been lost.
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‘s innovation on this front is that it turns this circumstance between two individuals into a metaphor for Japanese society as a whole, particularly the relationship between the present and the past, the city and the countryside. This is the type of thing that Ghibli is known for doing, but
). As a work of magical realism that refuses to confine itself to either the urban or the provincial worlds, Taki and Mitsuha’s journey involves both fateful meetings on the Tokyo subway and visits to the netherworld via remote mountain shrines. It’s a neat synthesis of the two types of magical realism I’ve seen most from Japan – the urban strain popularized by Haruki Murakami as well as
In the end, these parallel spaces come together to save the day in a situation that channels unresolved emotions surrounding recent events in Japan. If you were watching the news in 2011, you might remember the Fukushima disaster. It was the biggest nuclear incident since Chernobyl; three towns were evacuated in its aftermath, displacing hundreds of thousands of people. Many of these people still haven’t returned home. The surrounding area still constitutes an exclusion zone and may not be declared habitable again for decades. It was a traumatic moment not only for those directly affected, but for the people of Japan as a whole.
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Makes conscious use of Fukushima imagery – the barricade, the newscast, the circle of absence – to stir these cultural memories, but then it proceeds to work through these feelings in the safe space of an optimistic mainstream film. I imagine that this was a contributing factor to
‘s domestic success, alongside its general excellence. As Mad Max: Fury Road has proven, well-written and exhilarating original blockbusters are good, but if they also happen to cut through current cultural anxieties, that’s even better.
(Taki). It evens out in the first 20 minutes, however, and there were no performance hiccups for the rest of the film. The translation is largely excellent, excepting two particular difficulties. The first is that important connotations are lost in translating the particular Japanese word for “twilight” used throughout the film. The specific word happens to pun on a way of asking who are you?, meaning that every time the leads say it, they’re also asking for “
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” This double meaning is hugely resonant throughout the film, but there’s no easy way to capture that in English. The second is a scene where the humor hinges on different gendered versions of Japanese first-person pronouns. Since we don’t have those in English, this is substituted by Mitsuha awkwardly referring to herself in the third person. It’s clumsy, but I also can’t think of a better way to have resolved the issue, so I’ll have to accept it as a necessary casualty. These are just nitpicks – overall, this English
) is a proficient English speaker, and his delivery sounds fine. The problem is in the song lyrics, which are as clunky as translated song lyrics tend to be without meticulous adaptation. They cram in more words than can fit per line, and I generally prefer how the Japanese versions flow. They’re not terrible though, and it’s cool that we even got these versions in the first place.
After all of this discussion of the film’s themes and the director’s career, if you have to take one thing from this review, let it be that
Your Name. 03′ Von ‘makoto Shinkai’
. The body swap plot results in a ton of funny gags, mostly because it’s blunt and straightforward about the kind of stuff that would go down in that situation. The character writing is strong, though not super unique. Taki and Mitsuha are distinct and likable enough to carry the story, and it’s fun to see them connect through their game of corporeal telephone. It’s also super well-paced, accomplishing more in its first half-hour than most films do in their entire runtimes. The chronologically scrambled plotting is both novel and effective, tying into the movie’s metaphor for time as interwoven threads. And for all my talk of its cultural context,
Lived up to half a year’s worth of hype. I look forward to seeing it again with friends in a few days, when it finally arrives in theaters near me. Shinkai has finally pulled off an unqualified hit, and I look forward to seeing what he’ll do next. Maybe something that’s not about star-crossed lovers? I can only dream.
+ Thrilling and tightly plotted blockbuster for all audiences, finally couples Shinkai’s signature aesthetic with a strong story and consistently lush animation, thematically resonant on several levelsUpdate (2/11/27): Andrew Partridge from Anime Limited has responded with a statement, which can be found in the Anime Limited Discussion Thread on our forums.
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Note: After this review was written, some allegations arose regarding some potential audio/visual quality issues in the Blu-Ray release. At publication time, these issues are unconfirmed, and we unfortunately can’t test for ourselves as we only have a DVD screener, and didn’t notice any issues with it. We’ve reached out to Anime Limited regarding these issues, and we will update this article with any response.
, a five-minute-long monochrome short that garnered the début director several awards and an instant recognition as an exciting young filmmaker. Since then, he’s gone from strength to strength, and last year, he released his fifth feature film,
In Japan) follows two teenagers – Tokyo-based Taki Tachibana and rural shrine maiden Mitsuha Miyamizu – who find themselves randomly switching bodies with each other, and are forced to learn to live within each other’s lives, culture, relationships and traditions. But this synopsis does little to convey the content or power of the film – far from being simply a far-Eastern
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The story is difficult to describe without going into spoiler territory, but it makes for sensitive,
