Your Name, the highest grossing anime movie to date worldwide, finally makes its way to to the U.S. this year via FUNimation. It’s a touching and unusual supernatural story of a high school girl named Mitsuha, who lives in a town in the mountainous countryside of Japan. Mitsuha lives with her younger sister and grandmother at a shrine, wishing she could escape the country and be a handsome boy who lives in Tokyo. Elsewhere, Taki is a high school boy living in Tokyo who works part time as a waiter in a restaurant. One day, Mitsuha’s wish comes true, as she wakes up in Taki’s body and vice versa. Both are shocked waking up in a body of the opposite sex, but each soon adjusts to the temporary situation and makes the best of what happened before switching back to their own body the next day. Each soon realizes that the person they occupy while switched is in their body and has done things they would not do. Mitsuha helps Taki go out on a date with his crush from work, which embarrasses Taki to no end, while Taki helps Mitsuha become a popular rebel tomboy at school. The switching begins to happen regularly, and each begins to leave notes on each other’s phones and bodies, via marker, of what the other did while they occupied the other’s body. Their shared frustration with the other and random scribblings on each other’s body of it are some of the best moments in the movie. Suddenly, the switching stops completely, leaving Taki wondering about what happened to Mitsuha. Taki tries calling Mitsuha’s number but it’s unreachable or disconnected. With no way of contacting Mitsuha otherwise, Taki becomes obsessed in trying to find Mitsuha. His journey leads him to a startling discovery.
One would never imagine such a twisted supernatural story would be so surprisingly heartwarmingly poignant, but what starts out as an embarrassing farce soon turns into a tale of friendship and love that spans the ever present distance between them, evident in the unexpected tears each has at certain moments. They’re so close and yet so far from actually meeting one another in person that it becomes heart-wrenching to see and endure. It comes down to the smallest of details in the other’s life which help Mitsuha and Taki connect with one another.
The 2D hand drawn animation beautifully renders the otherwise slice-of-life tale with breathtaking vast backgrounds down to the highly detailed pencil sketches drawn by Taki in his sketchbook of Mitsuha’s home town. The movie should have gotten an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature this past year.
While the idea that 2 souls are interconnected is a pretty old idea in Asian culture, where souls are reborn again over and over in the reincarnation cycle, this take on 2 destined souls will definitely leave you teary-eyed in the end.
