Your Name

Is there a name for that thing where you’re watch­ing a film and hav­ing a jol­ly old time with it, and then at about the mid-point it just crash­es and burns? Like, from out of nowhere. The fun quo­tient instant­ly dries up, and you’re left to clock-watch for the annoy­ing remainder.

The ani­mat­ed romance Your Name by Japan­ese direc­tor Mako­to Shinkai is one such movie, though this hasn’t pre­vent­ed the box office tills ring­ing loud in its home­land, with the film now con­sid­ered one of the biggest mon­ey-spin­ners the coun­try has ever wit­nessed. Indeed, Shinkai is already being spo­ken of as the pre­tender to the vacant throne of retired Stu­dio Ghi­b­li sage, Hayao Miyazaki.

But why? Your Name plays a clever trick of lur­ing in view­ers with its ​’80s-Hol­ly­wood ref­er­enc­ing open­ing pas­sage in which a teenage school­girl from the coun­try­side mys­te­ri­ous­ly wakes up in the body of a teenage school­boy from the city. Then, the same hap­pens again, albeit vice ver­sa. After the ini­tial shock, the pair begin to enjoy their alter­na­tive iden­ti­ties, relay­ing salient infor­ma­tion through a diary smart­phone app and occa­sion­al­ly mak­ing out-of-char­ac­ter moves to speed up a poten­tial romance or a pro­fes­sion­al oppor­tu­ni­ty. Every­thing about this open­ing gam­bit is beau­ti­ful, from the way it nos­tal­gi­cal­ly ref­er­ences the tenets of the time­worn bodyswap movie, to its attempts to mess with gen­der and sex­u­al­i­ty. Yet at the point where you think that Shinkai is going to whack this thing into top gear, he opts to slow things right down.

Maybe it’s down to mis­aligned ambi­tion or just the desire to pro­duce some­thing with some polit­i­cal heft, but Your Name dies a death when it lurch­es into its con­fus­ing sec­ond act. The pure fun of the first half abrupt­ly ends, as the boy, Taki, stops receiv­ing vis­i­ta­tions from his out-of-town pal, Mit­suha, and attempts to find out why. There are some spu­ri­ous links to a Fukushi­ma-style dis­as­ter and the wor­ry­ing sug­ges­tion that, with the help of time trav­el and tele­por­ta­tion, we might just be able to evade these calami­ties in the future. It’s as if the film’s first half was entire­ly unnec­es­sary, pure­ly a device to briefly con­nect these two souls and cre­ate a con­text for a sop­py cli­mac­tic search.

Cer­tain­ly it sails by on its slick visu­als and big emo­tions, and Shinkai excels when it comes to plant­i­ng images into the mind and then return­ing to explain them lat­er in the film. It’s a shame that the star-crossed romance doesn’t gel at all – it lures you in with its care­free charms, only to then force-feed you earnest life lessons and gar­ish melo­dra­ma for the pro­tract­ed remainder.