Movie Review: Your Name. (2016)

Your Name. (2016) co-written and directed by Mokoto Shinkai

Mitsuha (voiced by Mone Kamishiraishi) is a small-town teen who dreams of a better life. She thinks it would be awesome to live in a big city like Tokyo. Her little sister and parents put up with her strange behavior but her behavior becomes even stranger at the beginning of the movie. Taki (voiced by Ryunosuke Kamiki) is a teenage boy who lives in Tokyo and has a very busy life. He goes to school and works a job in the evenings (the typical waiting tables). He wonders what it would be like to live in a small town. 

As the movie starts, he wakes up in her body and she wakes up in his body. So he has to deal with being female (there's some awkward breast-grabbing that I found off-putting at the very start of the film) and the weird-to-him quirks of small-town life. And the other problems--not knowing her schedule, her friends, and her habits. She has the same problems in the big city, especially without any experience as a waiter. The comedy potential is obvious. The story also has some romantic potential but the film is more subtle about that.

The story spins out a strange tale as they live each other's lives for a day or two and then switch back. The plot has some very interesting and intriguing twists that make the ending less certain than the standard romantic comedy of this sort. There's a bit of amnesia and convenient inability to reach each other that is mostly explained by the end of the movie. The path of discovery (for the viewer) is compelling and reached the sweet ending I was expecting but by a direction I was not anticipating. The anime-style works well for the story and the actors do a good job. People claim Mokoto Shinkai is the next Miyazaki, which seems a bit too much, but I will definitely try out some of his other films to find out.

Recommended.

This is available streaming on Crunchyroll as of this writing (June 2024).