Your Name

Plot

Mitsuha, a high school girl living in the town of Itomori in Japan's mountainous Hida region, is bored of country life and wishes she were a handsome Tokyo boy. With her grandmother and younger sister, she makes kuchikamizake sake and leaves it as an offering in the family tomb on a mountaintop outside the town.

Mitsuha and Taki, a high school boy living in Tokyo, begin switching bodies intermittently. Their memories of each swap fade quickly, similar to dreams. They realize the experiences are real when their friends and family tell them they have acted strangely recently. They begin to communicate by leaving notes in Mitsuha's notebook and memos on Taki's phone, and intervene in each other's lives. Mitsuha helps Taki develop a relationship with his coworker Miki, while Taki helps Mitsuha become popular in school. Mitsuha tells Taki about a comet expected to pass Earth in a few days' time, on the day of her town's festival.

One day, Taki wakes up back in his body. After an unsuccessful date with Miki, he tries to contact Mitsuha but fails. He decides to visit her hometown, but does not know its name and his memories of it are fading. A restaurant owner in Hida recognizes the town from Taki's sketch and tells him it was destroyed by a fragment of comet three years ago. Taki finds Mitsuha's name in the records of fatalities.

Taki goes to Mitsuha's family shrine and realizes that he and Mitsuha's timelines were separated by three years. He finds the kuchikamizake and drinks it, hoping to reconnect to her body before the comet strikes. He wakes up in her body on the morning of the festival and convinces her friends to help him evacuate the village. Taki realizes that Mitsuha might be in his body at the shrine and goes back to the mountain.

Mitsuha wakes up in Taki's body at the shrine, and although they sense each other's presence on the mountain, she and Taki are separated by time. They realize it is twilight, travel back to their own bodies, and finally meet. Taki tells Mitsuha to convince her estranged father, the mayor of Itomori, to evacuate the town. As they return to their respective timelines, they attempt to write each other's names on their hands so they won't forget each other, but Mitsuha disappears before she can write hers.

Their memories of each other start to fade. Mitsuha realizes that Taki wrote "I love you" on her hand instead of his name. Mitsuha confronts her father and convinces him to evacuate the town. The comet piece crashes to Earth, destroying Itomori, but its inhabitants survive.

Five years later, Taki has graduated from university and is searching for a job, but senses he is missing something important. He recognizes Mitsuha's friends in a Tokyo restaurant, but cannot identify them. One day, Taki and Mitsuha recognize each other when their trains draw parallel. They disembark and search for one another, finally meeting on a staircase. Feeling as though they have met before, they ask for each other's name.

Production

Inspiration for the story came from works including Shūzō Oshimi's Inside Mari, Ranma ½, the Heian period novel Torikaebaya Monogatari, and Greg Egan's short story The Safe-Deposit Box.

While the town of Itomori, one of the film's settings, is fictional, the film drew inspirations from real-life locations that provided backdrop for the town. Such locations include the city of Hida in Gifu Prefecture and its library, Hida City Library.

Music

Yojiro Noda, the lead vocalist of the Japanese rock band Radwimps, composed the theme music of Your Name. Director Makoto Shinkai requested him to compose its music "in a way that the music will (supplement) the dialogue or monologue of the characters". Your Name features the following songs performed by Radwimps:

The soundtrack of the film was well received by both audiences and critics alike and is acknowledged as being one of the factors behind its success at the box office. The film's soundtrack was the runner-up in the "Best Soundtrack" category at the 2016 Newtype Anime Awards, while the song ZenZenZense was the runner-up in the "Best Theme Song Category".

Release

The film premiered at the 2016 Anime Expo convention in Los Angeles, California on July 3, 2016, and later was released theatrically in Japan on August 26, 2016. The film is scheduled to be released in 92 countries. It was released in China by Huaxia Film Distribution on December 2, 2016. In order to qualify for the Academy Awards, the film was released for one week (December 2–8, 2016) in Los Angeles. The film was released in Australian cinemas on limited release on November 24, 2016 by Madman Entertainment in both its original Japanese and an English dub. Madman also released the film in New Zealand on December 1, 2016. The film was also released in the United Kingdom on November 24, 2016. On January 17, 2017, Funimation announced that the film will be released in North American theaters on April 7, 2017.

Box office

Your Name became a huge commercial success, especially in Japan, where it grossed ¥23 billion (~US$190 million). That is the second largest gross for a domestic film in Japan, behind Spirited Away, and the fourth largest ever, behind Titanic and Frozen. It is the first anime not directed by Hayao Miyazaki to earn more than $100 million (~￥10 billion) at the Japanese box office. It topped the box office in Japan for a record-breaking 12 non-consecutive weekends. It held the number-one position for nine consecutive weekends before being toppled by Death Note: Light Up the New World in the last weekend of October. It returned to the top for another three weeks before finally being dethroned by Hollywood blockbuster Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.

The success of the film also extended beyond Japan. In China, it became the highest-grossing Japanese film in the world's second largest movie market on December 17, 2016. It has grossed US$81.3 million in China and is the highest-grossing 2D animated film in the country. Its opening screened in over 7,000 theaters. It made an estimated $10.9 million on its opening day from 66,000 screenings and attracting over 2.77 million admissions, the biggest 2D animated opening in the country.

It is the highest-grossing Japanese film in Thailand, with ฿44.1 million (US$1.23 million). As of December 26, the film has grossed $771,945 USD in Australia. and $95,278 USD in New Zealand. On a December 20 blog post, the Australian distributor Madman stated that the film had made over $1,000,000 AUD in the Australian box office alone before closing its limited release run. The film was number-one on its opening five days in South Korea, with 1.18 million admissions and a gross of US$8.2 million, becoming the first Japanese film since Howl's Moving Castle to reach number one in the country.

Critical reception

Your Name received critical acclaim. On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 97%, based on 64 reviews, and an average rating of 8.2/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "As beautifully animated as it is emotionally satisfying, Your Name adds another outstanding chapter to writer-director Makoto Shinkai's filmography." On Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating, the film has a score 78 out of 100, based on 22 critics, indicating "Generally favorable reviews".

Mark Schilling of The Japan Times gave the film a rating of 4 out of 5 and praised the film's animation for its "blend of gorgeous, realistic detail and emotionally grounded fantasy". However, he criticized the film's "over-deliver[y]" of "the comedy of adolescent embarrassment and awkwardness" and its ending for being "To the surprise of no one who has ever seen a Japanese seishun eiga (youth drama)".

Reception outside of Japan was also very positive. Mark Kermode called the film his ninth favourite film to be released in the United Kingdom in 2016.

Despite the praise he received, Makoto Shinkai insisted that the film is not as good as it could have been: "There are things we could not do, Masashi Ando [Director of animation] wanted to keep working [on] but had to stop us for lack of money ... For me it’s incomplete, unbalanced. The plot is fine but the film is not at all perfect. Two years was not enough."