Remembering “Your Name”
Your Name by Makoto Shinkai is the highest grossing anime film to come out of Japan since Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. Despite its abundance of Japanese tradition and hyperrealistic Japanese landscapes, the film still saw a large amount of praise from Western audiences. What allows this film to be so universally popular? While Your Name’s astounding visual presentation may have drawn in a large audience, I believe that there is something at the heart of this film that lets it resonate so strongly with anyone who may view it. Its subtext of nostalgia and balancing the past and present may have allowed it to resonate strongly with its Japanese audience, but its romantic overtext and how the lessons of the subtext apply to romance are how it cements itself in the world stage.
The film follows Taki and Mitsuha, a young boy and girl living totally different lives. Taki is a high school boy living in the heart of Tokyo, works a part-time job at a large Italian restaurant, and strives to become an architect. He wholly embodies the soul of a modern Japanese person. On the other hand, there’s Mitsuha. She lives in the fictional rural town of Itomori, where she spends most of her days going to school and working as a shrine maiden for the Miyamizu Shrine. The film puts a strong emphasis on her performance of the kuchikamisake ritual in the beginning of the film, as well as the practice of braiding strings with her grandmother later in the film. Unlike Taki, Mitsuha represents Japan’s strong spiritual past.
Rather than portraying the main conflict between these main characters as the differences between their lifestyles, Shinkai instead opts to pit them against their memory of one another. Throughout the film, Taki and Mitsuha regularly switch bodies. While Mitsuha is able to fully realize her dream of living in a modern city, Taki gets to experience the wholesome spiritual connections that have long been abandoned in Tokyo. However, they stop switching bodies one day and Taki begins to lose the memories he has with Mitsuha. The first and second acts of the film are primarily spent building the main characters and their relationship, while the third act follows Taki as he tries to regain those memories of a time long gone.
Despite posting their article on a blog site, user NaChiKyoTsuki97 elaborates the main struggle the Shinkai is trying to portray in the film quite eloquently. According to them, Your Name is “a story that speaks of the modern Japanese struggle with the disconnect with its history (and the fear of losing more), its desire to reconnect through rituals, as well as its aspirations and need to progress.” NaChiKyoTsuki97 explains how the film uses its beautiful, hyperrealistic portrayal of the countryside to elicit the beauty of a traditional Japan along with its twinkling depiction of Tokyo to paint both Japan’s past and present in a positive light. The way Taki and Mitsuha lose their memory of one another at the end of the film, only to reunite without any knowledge of one another except for the feelings they have, further serves Shinkai’s message, “that progress in Japan can only be truly achieved through the preservation and continued evolution of tradition and modernity” (NaChiKyoTsuki97).
This message is most eloquently shown in the scene where Mitsuha is braiding cords with her grandmother. Close shots of the grandmother working with many colored strings, mixed with the clacks of the wood as she pushes the braids together and the warm lighting, immediately fills the audience with a more traditional sense of home. A brief shot of Mitsuha’s younger sister working on a spool of string in the corner is shown, illustrating her lack of skill with the threads. When she says “I’d rather do that too,” the grandmother says she’s not ready yet, and gives her a brief lecture on listening to the voice of the threads and connecting to them. This leads to disheartened shot of the younger sister, saying “threads don’t talk, though.” Mitsuha’s younger sister is used to portray the lack of respect for old traditions in modern Japan in this scene. On the other hand, Mitsuha herself acts as a bridge between the old and the new. Not just in terms of age, but also in terms of ideology. Mitsuha interprets her grandmother’s lecture and tells her younger sister to concentrate on the strings.
This is followed up by a shot of all three of them sitting in the room working on strings. They are surrounded by the ornate, classic Japanese architecture of their home, further cementing the beauty of an old Japan. However, in this shot both Mitsuha’s younger sister and grandmother are partly obstructed by objects in the room, suggesting the two are clouded by their strong biases to either past or present. As the grandmother tells the tale of a fire that burned all records of the town’s past, more shots of Mitsuha and her grandmother working with the threads are shown.
The cord-making scene comes to a close with a shot of all three of them working on the threads again, but this time framed from the garden outside. A greater emphasis is placed on the natural beauty, while all the characters are no longer obstructed by anything. The only queue to the differences between the characters is the lighting. The grandmother is fully lit, indicating her full attention and respect for the traditions of the past, while Mitsuha is half-lit and her younger sister is back-lit, painting her in shadow. All while Mitsuha’s grandmother speaks a profound message, “So, the meaning of our festivals became unknown and only the form lived on. But even if words are lost, tradition should be handed down. And that is the important task we at Miyamizu Shine have.”
Due to the delicate work Shinkai and Radwimps had with integrating the score to the film, it is important to note that this scene does not have any music in the background. Instead, it is just the ambient sounds of them working on the threads and the nature outside. The lack of music in this scene indicates the emphasis Shinkai wants to place on this message, removing any sort of auditory distractions one might have while viewing the scene.
However, this potent message for the Japanese public does not quite explain how the film grew to be so internationally acclaimed. Granted, the scope of anime has been growing the West for some time, so there would be a Western audience to view it regardless of its execution. Yet that does not fully encapsulate the reason why even those that do no watch anime regularly find the film so appealing. NaChiKyoTsuki97 believes the main reason that Your Name has seen such acclaim is through its commodification of Japanese iconography. In an effort to market a “Cool Japan” the film uses its hyperrealistic visuals to portray the country in a positive light, bringing in the eyes of an international audiences and leading them to a Japanese pilgrimage (NaChiKyoTsuki97). I do not believe that is the whole story, though.
I believe that there is a message in the overtext that pulls in universal audiences. In applying the messages of nostalgia and reconciliation of the past to the romantic plot of the film, one could interpret its overtextual message as something along these lines: love is a force that surpasses even the bounds of time, and it can be found in the unlikeliest of places. The random aspect of romance can be found in how Mitsuha and Taki switch bodies with no apparent cause. She randomly wakes up in his body, and he in hers. It appears that the relationship between the two is mostly platonic for the first half of the film, but after going on a date with a coworker, Taki realizes that he does indeed have romantic feelings for Mitsuha. The last act of the film is spent trying to prevent the disaster that killed Mitsuha three years ago so they could spend their lives together. In its simplest form, a form that can latch onto general audiences, the film is a rollercoaster of romance. A very potent one that is granted effect by its visual style and soundtrack. These base factors of the film are what I believe to be the main reason it saw widespread international recognition.
One of the strongest examples of the strength of its presentation alone is in the ending of the film. As Radwimps’ song “Nandemonaiya” begins to play, shots of all the supporting characters are shown in Tokyo living happy lives. This brief montage, accompanied by the gentle sounds of the guitar in the background and the smooth voice of Radwimps’ vocal lead, impart a sense of comfort in the conclusion despite Taki and Mitsuha not reuniting.
Shots of the main characters are shown after the supporting characters, showing their new morning routines without the body switching. The shots are cluttered with objects and painted in darkness. This shows that even though they got what they wanted at the end, their lives are still empty without one another.
This is followed by a shot of Taki emerging from his apartment. Tokyo is no longer basked in the cool blue light of the past, instead it has incorporated the warm lighting typically used for Itomori. As the song’s lyrics say “just a little more” over and over again, the idea of Taki and Mitsuha finally being able to live their lives together is teased to the audience. The lighting is used to indicate the sweetness of everyone living happily in the future, the reconciliation of the past with the present, while the song is used to indicate the bitterness of Taki and Mitsuha unable to find one another for five years.
A brief shot of trains is shown to introduce the idea of Taki and Mitsuha both being on a train themselves and the possibility of the two seeing each other as their trains pass one another. This is followed by close shots of Taki and Mitsuha’s torsos. Their faces are concealed and a part of their bodies are cast in shadow. The shadows further indicate something missing in their lives, due to its sharp division of their bodies, while the concealment of their faces indicate how they blend in with the crowd and would probably be unable to recognize one another amidst the bustling streets.
As the first verse of the song comes to a close, a shot of Mitsuha’s bewildered eyes are shown. Her face is still semi-shadowed, but the lack of light on her eyes allows the audience to infer that her vision of Taki in the train beside her, the following shot, is unclouded. The shot of Taki is shown over Mitsuha’s shoulder. The amount of darkness on the screen has gone down, indicating the joy of finally finding one another, but is not gone yet since they have not actually met. Furthermore, the shot is boxed in by both the train doors and Mitsuha’s own head. Showing her head next to Taki, their figures divided by steel, further teases the audience about their relationship. They are so close yet are unable to reach the other due to the train. This shot is mirrored from Taki’s perspective, but this time the trains grow further apart until another train cuts their view of each other before the song reaches its chorus.
Their brief reunion is as spontaneous as the first time they knew about each other, and with this scene Shinkai instills the audience with the hope of the story coming to a happy ending, while also taking advantage of that hope by ripping the two away from each other, forcing them to find the other in Tokyo. Thereby instilling the film with one last invigorating burst of energy prior to its conclusion.
Makoto Shinkai’s Your Name has become an international phenomenon because of how well it resonates with both its local and global audience. For the Japanese people, Shinkai touches on the struggle they have had as the country becomes more and more modern. The traditional, spiritual past has been lost to the eyes of so many Japanese people. Shinkai soothes the public’s woes of losing their history through Taki and Mitsuha’s relationship, as well as the sage advice he gives through Mitsuha’s grandmother. For the international audience, Shinkai gives his all to the craft by creating a distinct audio visual presentation with a universal tale of romance that anyone could latch onto.
