Your Name Review

For four films Shinkai had been making the same short story: two people, enormous distance, no reunion, a lot of very good clouds. This is the one where he builds a structure. The body swap runs as light comedy for forty minutes, Mitsuha waking up in Taki's Tokyo apartment and Taki failing to be a convincing teenage girl in Itomori, and CoMix Wave spend that stretch on things almost nobody animates: the sun through a train window, rain on tarmac, the particular light over a lake at five in the afternoon.

Then the midpoint turns the phones off, and the film reveals that the two halves were never happening at the same time. It is a genuinely good trick, set up fairly and paid off at speed, and it converts all that landscape work into dread. The twilight scene on the crater rim is the best thing Shinkai has directed. Radwimps write the score as songs with lyrics, which drags the last act toward music video, and the ending reaches for its reunion three or four times more than it needs to.

The cast is thin outside the leads: Mitsuha's sister and grandmother are sketches, Taki's friends exist to be told things. None of that stopped it from becoming the highest grossing anime film in the world at the time, and the reason is not the marketing. It is that the trick works.