Title: Your Name.
Release Date: July 3, 2016
Director: Makoto Shinkai
Production Company: Toho | CoMix Wave Films
Summary/Review:
Mitsuha Miyamizu (Mone Kamishiraishi) is a teenage girl living in a rural Japanese village. Taki Tachibana (Ryunosuke Kamiki) is a teenage boy living in the heart of Tokyo. They have nothing in common, and don’t even know one another. But one day they mysteriously begin swapping bodies, something that continues periodically over time. They begin to learn more about one another by recording diary entries into one another’s phones. Ultimately they begin to realize that their fate is tied in with a comet that broke-up over Japan three years earlier.
This movie has some commonalities with other in the body swap genre, such as a running gag of Taki fondling “his” breasts every time he wakes up in Mitsuha’s body. But it goes way beyond those surface similarities and works really well as romantic fantasy that draws on Japanese culture and collective trauma. I felt at times that the musical score was inappropriate to the mood of the movie, and that the epilogue of the movie runs on a bit too long. But other than that it is a brilliant and imaginative story with a great visual delight.
Rating: ***1/2
Panorama of the Mountains 