Your Name

Two teenagers share a profound, magical connection upon discovering they are swapping bodies. Things manage to become even more complicated when the boy and girl decide to meet in person. A worldwide smash hit that heralded director Makoto Shinkai as a new master of animation. Its sumptuous attention to detail in yearning vistas and pulsing city streets elevates its central romance to world-rending levels of destiny and longing.

Review from rogerebert.com

“I feel like I’m always searching for something, someone.” Haven’t we all felt that at some point in our lives? A sense of displacement from our daily lives, and a search for something that would anchor us to a more commonly perceived sense of normalcy? The Japanese phenomenon “Your Name” (it was the highest grossing film of [2016] in the country and the highest grossing anime film of all time worldwide, passing “Spirited Away“) is about this highly relatable sense of looking for something, someone, someplace. And so much more. It’s a beautiful, captivating piece of work that gets off to kind of a rocky start but achieves remarkable momentum toward an emotional, powerful ending. And you won’t see a better-looking animated film all year.

Writer/director Makoto Shinkai takes what could have been a very cheesy “Freaky Friday”-esque concept and imbues it with melancholy and honesty. The set-up is relatively simple: Mitsuha (Mone Kamishiraishi) is a high school-age girl who lives in the fictional Itomori, a gorgeous, quaint village in the Hida region of Japan; Taki (Ryunosuke Kamiki) is a slightly older boy living in Tokyo. They are both average kids with their own social circles, but they have no actual connection, and lead very different lives, at least partially defined by their equally gorgeous settings of city vs. country.

One day, Taki wakes up and looks down to see breasts. He’s in Mitsuha’s body. The next day, Mitsuha wakes up back in her own form but with only vague memories of the day before. And, of course, the same thing happens in reverse. Mostly through discussions with people around them about how weird they were acting, Mitsuha and Taki figure out that they’re switching places randomly, only after sleep. Rather than get into wacky hijinks like an ‘80s Disney movie, they work to help each other, leaving each other notes and diaries about what happened when they switched places. For example, Mitsuha has the courage to talk to the girl Taki likes, serving as a sort of body-switching Cyrano de Bergerac. But one day, they stop switching, and Taki can’t get a hold of Mitsuha in any way. He has vague memories of vistas from Mitsuha’s life and he sets out to try to find her. This is when “Your Name” becomes something very unexpected.

Read the rest of the review from Brian Tallerico here...