Overview

I’ve only seen a few anime movies in my time, such as The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya, the Madoka Magica movie, the Kizumonogatari trilogy, and a few other movies such as some from the Naruto series, but Your Name. was better than all of these. There aren’t many things that make me feel strongly one way or another, but this movie almost brought me to tears on multiple occasions. Almost.

The main genre I would put Your Name. in is drama. This is a drama about two high school students who, despite living far apart and not knowing each other, have their fates intertwined.

Taki Tachibana and Mitsuha Miyamizu wake up one day to find they’ve switched bodies. This movie is about their lives both in their own and each other’s bodies and the great lengths they go to in order to finally meet each other.

Characters

Mitsuha Miyamizu is the first of the two protagonists we meet in the movie. She lives out in the mountains in the middle of nowhere with her sister and her grandmother. When not at school, she acts as a Shinto shrine maiden with her younger sister.

Life out in the middle of nowhere as a shrine maiden is not the life Mistuha wants to live. She wants to live somewhere exciting as a boy who doesn’t have the same responsibilities she has.

Taki Tachibana is essentially Mitsuha’s opposite. He lives in Tokyo and seems to act out as a rebel causing him to get into fights with others. Unlike Mitsuha, however, he doesn’t feel the same way about his life that she does. He doesn’t want to live as a girl out in the middle of nowhere.

There are a number of supporting characters throughout the movie, but rather than going through them all I’m just going to pick my favorite one which is Yotsuha Miyamizu. Yotsuha is the younger sister of Mitsuha, as well as the best character in the movie.

Yotsuha is an entertaining elementary schooler who finds her older sister embarrassing, especially when she starts acting weirder than usual. As is usually the case with elementary-aged characters, Yotsuha serves as a comedic character in the movie. Kids say some funny things and I felt that Yotsuha captured this perfectly.

Spoilers

This time around I decided to set aside a section specifically for spoilers so skip this and go down to the conclusion if you want to go into this movie blind. That said, this section is where I’ll be breaking down some of the things I liked or didn’t like about the movie.

To start off I’ll mention that the art, animation, and soundtrack for Your Name. were amazing. And for the most part the writing of the story was pretty flawless too except for a few minor things which we’ll get into a bit later. First I want to talk about one of the things I liked most about this movie which was the twist.

The major twist of the movie doesn’t come at the end or even in the final act of the movie; instead it comes right in the middle. “What’s this twist?” you may be wondering if you want to be completely spoiled. Well, Mitsuha and the rest of her town are actually gone. They’re all dead due to the impact of a meteor which happened three years before the start of the movie.

This twist changed everything because up until this point we’re sitting there thinking this is going to be a heartwarming story about two kids who travel across vast distances to finally meet each other. While it drastically changed how I thought the movie would play out, it did it in a way that was surprising, but not simply for the sake of surprise.

So I liked the plot twist and how it was done, but what didn’t I like about the movie?

I can only think of two parts that I felt could have been done better. The first comes roughly 30 minutes into the movie when a song starts playing and we get some scenic shots of things. The timing and how this scene was done made it feel like it was supposed to be the ED of an anime episode instead of something in the middle of a movie.

When I saw that scene I really thought that this wasn’t actually a movie, but rather just a three-episode anime which was combined into movie format.

The second part I felt could have been done better was the ending of the movie. I like open endings, I do, but the ending of this movie seemed to be a bit lacking. I would have been completely fine if the movie ended with Taki and Mitsuha passing each other without recognizing each other at all.

However, what we got was neither the sad ending I just mentioned, nor the happy ending of the two characters finally being united. Instead, we get the lackluster realization that maybe they had seen each other somewhere before, but that’s all. There was no reunion and there was no real emotion for me in that final scene.

Conclusion

So at the beginning, I mentioned that Your Name. was the best anime movie I’ve seen, even better than the Kizumonogatari trilogy which I rated a 10. So, by this logic, Your Name. is also a 10/10. This is only the third anime I’ve given a 10; the other two are the Monogatari Series and the original Madoka Magica series.

Along with those two other series, I highly recommend this movie to anyone who likes anime. And even for those who may not be into anime, this is still a solid movie filled with all kinds of emotions.