Your Name

Ever since I first heard about Kimi no Na wa. I have been wanting to watch it. Finally, I was able to and here is the full review. I did my best to keep it as spoiler free review as I could.

• Genre: Supernatural, Drama, Romance, School
• Type: Movie
• Duration to watch: 1 hour 47 min
• Age restriction:  PG-13 – Teens 13 or older
• Release date: August 2016
• Animation Studio: CoMix Wave Films
• Japanese Title: Kimi no Na wa
• Kanji: 君の名は。

About:

Mitsuha Miyamizu is a high school girl and she wishes for a different life. Surprisingly she realises she is having gaps in her memory and soon she starts having realistic dreams about being a teenage boy in the bustling city of Tokyo—a dream that stands in stark contrast to her present life in the countryside. Meanwhile, in the city, Taki Tachibana is busy living a busy life as a high school student while juggling his part-time job and hopes for a future in architecture but he too is having strange dreams where he is a teenage girl living in a rural mountain town of Japan.

Together they slowly work out some rules to make sure that they do not ruin each other’s lives or reputation once they realise that they really are not dreaming and in fact have swapped places. They soon want to know more about one another, but will they ever meet as themselves?

My Thoughts: 

I have fallen in love with the music for this movie. I could quite happily listen to the songs for hours on end. So the music was a really great start. Then there was the animation which I found really pretty.

I really enjoyed the whole story and a lot of it was really well written and thought out. You could understand and see what each character was thinking and what they were feeling without much effort and the bonds between them were clearly evident. It was really amusing to watch the two of them switch places and slowly adjust to their new bodies and vastly different surroundings. The way that they started communicating was I think pretty clever although really simple and straight forward. I am glad the characters kept their mannerisms even though they had switched bodies which was really great to see.

Of course, there is one glaring issue which I do have trouble getting past and that is the three-year gap. The fact that they are living in a timeline with a three-year difference I can get behind, that is basically the whole focal point of this and would have lost a big chunk of the plot if it was not there. No, my issue is the fact that neither Mitsuha nor Taki noticed. They went to school, where I presume they had to write the date in their work books – or is that only in real life? – okay moving on because we can not compare anime to real life since that would be a massive premise of a dismal streak that would ruin way too many anime. So the second point, Taki works so the date will feature quite a bit so I would have thought that Mitsuha would have at some point noticed this. Point three, they were keeping a diary to one another to keep each other informed of what had happened and with whom, uhm do I really need to go further into how this poses an issue with the year not being known? Lastly, they do have access to the internet and smart phones. With switching, at some point, they would have seen the year they were suddenly living in. But who knows, maybe it was part of the magic that blocked them from knowing the truth or prevented them from realising it.

I found it incredibly sad that the pair kept searching for something even though they did not know what they were looking for. They just felt as if they had been missing ‘something’. For me that kind of feeling I can only imagine it as being unbearable.

On the whole, I really did enjoy it and I would recommend this as a must watch. Have you watched Your Name? What did you think of it? Or if you have not yet watched it, will you?