IronWatcher’s review published on Letterboxd:
Watched on Blu-Ray
It's a wonderful dream that Mitsuha doesn't want to wake up from. For a long time, she has wanted to finally break out of the small town of Itomori in Japan's Hida mountain region. Here, where a train only runs once every two hours and two bars located right next to each other, of all places, make for a rather monotonous way to spend her free time, the teenage schoolgirl lives from day to day, longing to lead a different life. When she wakes up one morning to find that she is not only in a strange room, but also in the body of a boy of about the same age, Mitsuha imagines herself in a beautiful dream. As Taki, she lives in the midst of the frantically fast-paced everyday life of Tokyo, where the trains are crowded with hectic crowds and the pulse of the big city never seems to stand still between the sprawling skyscrapers and countless stores lined up next to each other.
In his animated film "Your Name," which, until 2020's "Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – The Movie: Mugen Train" set the new record, was considered the most successful anime of all time, director Makoto Shinkai tells the story of these two teenagers, Mitsuha and Taki, who switch bodies for a day at irregular intervals. While Mitsuha, after initial uncertainties, quickly falls into the special rhythm of Tokyo and Taki's life between school and a job as a waiter, the latter visibly enjoys drifting along in the clearly decelerated life in the more rural small town. In the style of a dreamy coming-of-age film, Shinkai depicts the parallel lives of the contrasting teenagers with buoyant lightness of foot, without ever neglecting the adolescent difficulties and longings that beset his young protagonists.
Through the narrative trick of body-swapping, "Your Name" also creates the impression of a scenario full of unreal incredibilities, alongside the wonderfully crafted animations, in which Mitsuha and Taki seem to travel between realities until they wake up the next morning in their own beds and bodies, as if from a dream. The director can't resist certain running gags, such as when Taki regularly grabs and kneads his breasts in Mitsuha's body, getting caught each time by Mitsuha's little sister Yotsuha, who thinks her big sister is slowly losing her mind. Through these humorous lightenings, Your Name by no means degenerates into a shallow comedy, but rather continuously explores the inner sensitivities of the young teenagers, who, in their search for their own identity, become confused in the increasing emotional chaos of the inexplicable, erratic body swapping.
However, Shinkai's work reaches true emotional greatness about halfway through the running time, when the imaginative story is steered in a completely new direction by a tragic twist. In this, "Your Name" is in some ways reminiscent of David Lowery's "A Ghost Story." Similar to that quiet, poetic meditation on the relationship between space and time, this film is from now on about how the budding love between two people is possibly capable of overcoming the rational boundaries of time and space as well as life and death. Their memories from each other's lives, which fade away without notes after awakening in their own bodies, are just as significant in this regard as a comet that is regularly visible in the sky and illuminates it in vibrant colors.
By resorting to time travel elements, which the director coherently interweaves with the peculiar mythology of this film, in which traditional Japanese customs play a major role, "Your Name" develops into a fight against oblivion. To a surreal rescue operation, in which different timelines must be broken through. But above all, it is a desperate journey in which two people who have been separated by fate try to find each other. And then there's that one scene late in the film where Shinkai pushes aside all the complications, barriers and barriers of the complicated time travel-body swap web and Mitsuha and Taki come face to face in the twilight of the setting sun. By subjecting the film for this one moment to a purely emotional logic, which previously already meanders enigmatically through the entire course of the plot, like a hair ribbon that here is able to connect two people across different universes, "Your Name" briefly shines at least as brightly as the sky repeatedly illuminated by the comet.
