At a certain point the swapping stops, and the movie becomes about Taki trying to find Mitshua’s town, only to discover that the town had been wiped out by a comet three years ago. The final act then being a race to avert disaster and save the town.
It taps into the things that so many Japanese works dealing with disasters do. I’ve seen critics bring up the Fukushima Daiichi disater, but it’s not explicitly about any real incident, it’s just tapping into some of those feeling and the ways events like that can effect people. And I just want to point out that this is a much older tradition in Japanese media. going back to Gojira. This part of the movie more reminded me of After the Quake by Haruki Murkami, a collection of short stories influenced, but not explicitly about the Kobe Earthquake. Murakami’s work, and explicitly the story “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo” from After the Quake, was very influential on Kunihiko Ikuha’s anime Mawaru Penguindrum, which itself was more specifically interested in the Tokyo Subway sarin gas attack. It’s not that Your Name isn’t tapping into the kinds of things people felt in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, it’s that those feelings are a part of the bigger experience of the human condition and the movie treats them as such.
Again, Your Name isn’t really breaking new ground, but what it is doing is effectively tapping into feelings and ideas that are relatable at a very low level. Like the strings of time talked about in the movie, all the thematic elements work together to form an effective web. All the elements to this story complement each other. And it’s all in service of the story of our two leads.
When I praised Mamoru Hosoda’s The Boy and the Beast last year, I talked about how that movie felt like a movie made for me. Your Name felt like a movie made for everyone. The way it handles people and the low level emotions and feelings it’s interested in and evokes makes it something I think everyone should be able to relate to somehow. And importantly it’s not evoking those feelings with an uplifting purpose in mind. This isn’t another “sad story” this is a story that uses that understanding and skill of evoking sadness to draw you in and take you on a journey worth taking.
I really liked this movie and I think it’s basically perfect. Thumbs up.
