Your Name (2016)
Makoto Shinkai is the perhaps the standard bearer for the idea of the onenote director. His films all feature the same images and perhaps more importantly, all feature the same theme: mono no aware. Indeed, his films typically involve characters accepting the transient nature of life through doomed relationships.
Shinkai doesn’t stray far with Your Name, a film featuring two characters who are separated by space and time. Mitsuha, a teenage girl bored with her life in a rural town swaps bodies with Taki, a hapless teenage boy who doesn’t know how to approach his first crush. Yes, there’s the physical humour that comes from the body-swap situation, as both characters deal with the issues of living in a body of the opposite sex, but most of that set up and character building seems perfunctory. In fact, even the means by which they swap bodies is unimportant, as Shinkai is more interested in how the characters communicate with each other rather than the situation that they find themselves in.
Taki eventually falls in love with Mitsuha, but one day he finds that he is unable to connect with her anymore. The body swapping has suddenly swapped, and when he tries to call her, he discovers that her number is not in service. This sudden disconnection causes him to slowly begin to forget his time with Mitsuha, as he is left to wonder if the entire incident was simply a dream. Unable to connect with her remotely, he tries his best to try to find her and meet her in person by drawing on the lingering memories that he had of her life. He tracks her down to a mountainous region of Japan, using a sketch of the town’s few landmarks based on his memories of his experience in Mitsuha’s body. When he finally puts a name to the place that he’s been searching for, Itomori, he discovers that town was destroyed three years prior by pieces of a falling comet, killing Mitsuha and permanently severing his connection with her. Any hope he had of ever meeting her is gone, and the best he can do is try to hang on to the fleeting memories of the time he spent communicating with her.
It’s a ridiculously high concept premise for a romance story, but you can see the potential for mono no aware in this set up. Taki and Mitsuha may know each other intimately, but the circumstances that created this unique connection between them also creates an impenetrable rift between them. Indeed, we learn that Mitsuha actually tried to meet Taki in person, but since Mitsuha is three years ahead of Taki, she finds him when he’s in middle school and is heartbroken when he doesn’t recognize her (yes, this is very much like The Lake House (2006)). Just as Taki might give up on ever meeting Mitsuha after learning that she died three years prior, she gives up on trying to connect with him because she doesn’t understand that their body-swaps transport her three years into the future.
A veteran of Shinkai wouldn’t be surprised at the situation the characters find themselves in. From the high concept Voices of a Distant Star (2002), in which two lovers are separated by the science of time dilation, to the more grounded The Garden of Words (2013), which features a relationship between a teacher and a student that, at the very least, must be put off until the student graduates from his school, it is almost fated that Taki and Mitsuha will never be together. If this was a typical Shinkai film, perhaps the lesson to be learned is that we must learn from and appreciate our immediate experiences, allowing them to inform our futures. Mitsuha dies, but she is for a time, able to experience the life in Tokyo that she has always wanted. Taki, who is inexperienced in love, finally makes a genuine connection with someone and can perhaps approach his future relationships with more maturity. Certainly that’s the ending that I expected.
But then we’re hit by the final act of the film. Taki is unwilling to accept Mitsuha’s death and uses the fact that their body swaps transport him through time to save Mitsuha and all the inhabitants of Itomori. During this process, they both manage to travel to the same place — a small shrine in the middle of a crater that has mystically allowed the women in Mitsuha’s family to experience “dreams” of becoming another person — and they are finally able to communicate with each other. This is the climax of their relationship, as the characters are finally able to connect with each other. They promise to meet each other after the people of Itomori are saved, and try to write each other’s names on their hands so that they won’t forget each other.
Shinkai plays with his audience a bit here, because we see that the connection between the two is severed before Mitsuha can finish writing her name on Taki’s hand. When we get a shot of Mitsuha’s hand a few minutes later, we see that he didn’t write his name, choosing to write “I love you” instead. Okay, so maybe we’re given the happy ending where the town is saved and Taki and Mitsuha are given their moment together. They’re finally able to communicate their feelings, even if they aren’t able to act on them. It’s still in line with what I’ve come to expect from a Shinkai film, a moment of happiness in the pathos of the tragic nature of this impossible relationship.
The denouement seems to suggest that this film won’t be any different from his other films. Five years after the their meeting, we see that Taki and Mitsuha have moved on with their lives. Taki is now a college graduate trying to find a job as a landscape designer. Mitsuha, now also living in Tokyo, has seemingly moved on with her life, leaving her younger sister at home to presumably carry on her family’s traditions (and perhaps have a body swap adventure of her own). Both characters feel that someone is missing from their lives, but they’re unable to articulate the emptiness that they feel. In a scene reminiscent of the ending of 5 Centimeters Per Second (2007), Taki and Mitsuha take separate trains that happen to cross each other and catch a glimpse of each other through the windows. Now, I can only imagine how most audiences would have reacted if the credits started scrolling down the screen after this chance meeting. If I had to hazard a guess, I would expect quite a negative reaction to the characters being so close to each other but still unable to meet each other.
I think it would have been fitting, as the last meeting between the two was separated by time and now the final meeting would have been separated from space. Perhaps seeing each other would have been enough for both of them, for them to realize that their time with each other, swapping into each other’s bodies, was real. They could let go of any lingering doubt about their past experiences, recognize that they had a special time with each other, and while they have both essentially put their lives on hold for five years, they can finally move on with their lives with the knowledge that the person they’ve been looking for exists, even if they don’t remember each other’s names.
Of course, that kind of ending probably wouldn’t have led to Your Name being one of the highest grossing films in Japanese history. Shinkai was definitely smart to give the film the payoff that everyone most likely wanted after the emotional experience he put them through. In the final moments of the film, we see Take and Mitsuha rush off their respective trains and run toward each other. At what is presumably the halfway point between the two train stations, they meet each other on Suga Shrine stairs. The pair tentatively walk past each other, before they both decide to throw caution to the wind and ask each other if they’ve met before. In tears, they ask each other, “Your name is…?”, before the film cuts to the credits.
Shinkai gives the catharsis that the audience demands, smartly allowing the characters to connect with each other in a physical space that represents a state of transition. We can assume that Taki and Mitsuha, having finally found each other, will climb or descend the stairs together and make the connection that has been five or eight years in the making. While I may have preferred a more subdued (or perhaps morose, depending on your perspective) ending, I’m glad that Shinkai didn’t lean on the crutch of melodramatic schmaltz by having the two characters jump into each other’s arms and share a passionate kiss while the camera spins around them.
Of course, I don’t want to attribute any intent to Shinkai. Maybe he’s matured as a filmmaker and is finally willing to budge on the type of story that he wants to tell. Your Name certainly has many of the mono no aware trademarks that can be found in all of his previous work, but the ending (and perhaps the accessible nature of the story as a whole) makes it much more palatable. Or maybe he made a calculated decision to make sure people walk out of the theater happy, so that his audience would be willing to recommend the film to their friends. Regardless of the reason, while I feel that the ending is a slight compromise, it’s one that I’m certainly content with. Whether or not Shinkai is the next Miyazaki, at the very least he’s finally made his mark on the Japanese anime film scene and we’ll get to see more from him in the future.
Although I believe Voices of a Distant Star and The Garden of Words are stronger films (perhaps, in part, because of their shorter running times), I can’t begrudge the fact that Your Name is the film that propels Shinkai into the mainstream consciousness. It’s a film that is both crowd pleasing and also manages to convey the emotion of mono no aware, and I’m more than happy to place it next to (but admittedly, not above!) films like Takahata’s Only Yesterday (1991) or Hosoda’s Wolf Children (2012) in my personal list of favourite anime films.
Miscellaneous Notes
The film is gorgeous, and I think the CG animated sequences look great for the most part, but I couldn’t help but be distracted by the frame rate of the shrine dance scene featuring Mitsuho and her sister. It was something that I noticed in the Girls und Panzer film as well, and I assume it’s just a technological problem that will be fixed as more anime productions incorporate CG animation into their traditional animation production pipeline.
The time travel “twist” really did bug me, but upon reflection while writing this review, I’ve come to find it acceptable. Yes, I think it’s still absurd that the characters wouldn’t have recognized that they were separated by 3 years time — imagine if you swapped bodies with someone from 3 years in the past… if nothing else, you’d notice that Trump wasn’t the President of the United States. That said, the 3 year difference allows the film’s central conflict to happen but also allows the characters to meet and have their happy ending. For me a happy compromise might have been if the characters were separated by 30 years, so that they can still meet, but it’s about pushing them together romantically… but again, my version of the film probably would have tanked at the box office.
The Tokyo locations are real, but the town of Itomori is an amalgamation of a few different places in Japan. This post from Fast Japan and these posts from Mike Hattsu show many of the references they used for their backgrounds.
