Makoto Shinkai's Your Name

A.K.A. Kimi no Na Wa

With the film being as big as it is (#5 highest grossing Japanese film in Japan, #2 animated just below Spirited Away, #1 highest grossing Japanese film ever in China & Thailand, nominated for Oscar), I fail to see why there's no thread up for this. It's been out in theaters in China, UK, SEA, and obviously Japan.

---

Reposting my opinion on the movie: It's the most gorgeous anime movie I've ever seen by quite a wide margin. The atmospheric soundtrack really helps. The story has some points that I'm iffy with, but it nailed down the themes pretty well and spent its good time getting you to root for the main characters. Also Shinkai successfully trolled me during the ending, with all the montage giving me 5cm flashbacks of fading love. Heartwarming moments are aplenty but nothing to cry rivers about.

Also, they can make entire seasons of comedy about Taki and Mitsuha's "Freaky Friday" Flip hijinks and I'll lap it up. Shame how they glossed over it with an insert song. 9/10 I see why it became such a big hit, and will probably watch a second time.

I missed its US theatrical run so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It hasn't really had its US theatrical run yet. They did a really short one in LA so it would qualify for an Oscar nomination. The actual one for people who don't live in LA will be sometime next year.

edited 21st Dec '16 5:34:29 PM by Kotomikun

It is a beautiful film to watch and I would highly recommend seeing it on the big screen, and spoiler-free if you can.

Egh, that's gonna be hard, seeing it's not even really coming out here for another year.

I'll be honest that I think it's the best of Shinkai's feature length works by far and I'd even go as far to say its the best thing he's done since Voices of a Distant Star.

Shinkai's always had a masterful eye for the visuals but its taken him a few attempts to get a feel for the pacing of the feature film format. Garden of Words more or less found its pacing but its visuals were rather subdued for Shinkai, but with Your Name he's finally brought the to things together and the result is magnificent.

Your Name is now officially the highest grossing anime movie of all time worldwide, surpassing Spirited Away. More good news I guess, and it still haven't been shown on US yet.

It is a superb movie that will finally finish my personal holy trinity of anime films alongside Princess Mononoke and Wolf Children Ame And Yuki without even featuring wolves. I saw it randomly (three hours to kill in Paris for medical exams which I decided to spend in a cinema) without knowing at all what it was about - and it was beautiful.

Apparently people are pissed that it wasn't nominated for an Oscar.

If The Secret Life of Pets is in, yeah, people can be pissed because it is a disgrace.

Edit: it isn't, and the rest of the list...I don't know about The Red Turtle, but those are good to excellent movies who had much more exposure than Your Name, so their presence makes perfect sense. Movies don't end up on the Oscar list without intense lobbying.

edited 25th Jan '17 1:08:33 PM by Julep

…I've never heard of "My Life as Zucchini" though.

But yeah, considering Kimi no Na wa is basically a glorified anime episode, it had little chance of being nominated.

Considering Your Name is the best selling anime movie ever by far and is as critically acclaimed as any Studio Ghibli movie, yeah it's quite a huge snub.

Studio Ghibli's Disney connections probably bought their nod considering how lukewarm The Red Turtle's reception is.

edited 25th Jan '17 1:17:00 PM by Memers

The Oscars are primarily a Hollywood infomercial about their best movies, actors, directors, etc. They cultivate the perception that it's the holy land of the absolute greatest audio-visual productions because that gets people to watch the infomercial, but it's not really relevant to anything outside of its American-mainstream-movies bubble... a few foreign things like Ghibli get tacked on to make it seem more worldly, but they'd never seriously consider something out of left field like Your Name, no matter how good/popular it is. (I was hoping it would get that foreign-thing-that-rarely-wins nomination slot, but the Ghibli bias is stronger than I thought.) We go through this every year.

It's already popular enough that I'm running into English-speakers whinging about how [insert obscure anime movie here] was way better, and it's not even officially released over here yet. No non-Miyazaki anime movie has ever been anywhere near this successful, and it's mostly beaten the Miyazaki brand, too. That's going to be rather significant in the future for Shinkai, regardless of whether he ever gets "Academy" recognition.

edited 26th Jan '17 4:59:27 PM by Kotomikun

I decided to go ahead and read the novelization (by the director himself) first.

My God, it fucking sucked. And I really loved the novel version of Garden of Words.

I'm a (socialist) professional writer serializing a WWII alternate history webnovel.

I've been hearing lots of things about this movie. I want to watch this movie so I can see whether or not it's worthy of the praise it gets.

Damn, I bought it. Haven't gotten around to reading it yet though...

For anyone who missed it, Funimation finally got around to opening ticket sales for the US. (I suspect they wanted it to coincide with CR's "Shinkai Day" thing...) Pretty large number of theaters, too, from the looks of it.

Just FYI, it goes into limited release in the US this week (300 screens).

I saw it last night. Wow, is this film amazing. Go see it.

So I just got back from watching this in theaters. It wasn't zomg holy sheet best movie evar, but it was pretty good — definitely worth a watch if you're into that sort of thing.

The oddest thing about it is that I still couldn't really tell you what "that sort of thing" is. At first I was expecting it to be a character study, watching the two protagonists learning about themselves through someone else's eyes — but in the second half of the movie, the plot kicks in something fierce. The relationship between the two characters isn't really the focus either, so I wouldn't call it a romance. It's certainly not a comedy or an action movie... so I can't really describe it as another more specific than "drama".

I thought they handled it really well in terms of knowing "who was who" based on body language and tone of voice. I'm pretty sure there was a Japanese gendered pronoun joke at one point, but I was watching the dub so I'm not sure. But even without that sort of thing, there were clear difference in their behavior as each other, even without obvious things like not knowing things they should or having skills they shouldn't. It was really well done, overall.

My biggest problem with it was how little time was spent on the actual relationship between Mitsuha and Taki. They did the initial setup for the body switching thing, spent a little time showing them figuring out how to communicate with notes and such, then the comet plot starts and oh hey now Taki is writing "I love you"? They definitely could have used some more development as they both got over the novelty of their situations, settle into each other's lives, and start to care about each other's friends and loved ones, not just their own. All of that is sort of implied, but for me that would be the most interesting part of the story, and it was just sort of glossed over. Having each of them get a better handle on themselves and their own lives by living in someone else's shoes is sort of a classic thing for this sort of story, and they didn't really go into that much because the comet took things over instead. Of course, the fact that Mitsuha had some obvious problems to deal with and Taki did not wasn't much help either.

The alternative would have been introducing the comet right from the start and making it clear that was the focus of the story. Have Taki's first dream be the one with Mitsuha blowing up, then go back and introduce the normal body swapping thing. Make it clear that Mitsuha has no idea what's coming but Taki at least has hints, and then the story is firmly about "Taki saving Mitsuda with his knowledge of the future", instead of changing gears halfway through and going from ""Freaky Friday" Flip shenanigans" to "Set Right What Once Went Wrong shenanigans". That also makes me wonder if it would work better as a series than as a movie. Even as just a one cour show, they definitely could have put that extra screen time to good use.

Still, overall it was quite good. Some obvious flaws, but definitely a thumbs up all around.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

If you're talking about the scene on the school rooftop, then yes, there was indeed an incorrect pronoun joke. (It's aired sub in Australian cinemas so I was able to follow along with which pronoun was being used)

Yeah, that's the scene I meant. It's pretty much untranslatable, but the dub did an alright job of getting the idea across. He (she) says something like "This girl..." and his friends go "Girl?!" so she backtracks to "...this gal?" and they go "Gal?" so she says "this guy" and they accept that. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense if you don't understand the pronoun thing, but it's clear from context that she (he) said something hugely out of character and slowly gets it "right", which is basically the point of the scene.

And actually, I was surprised to see that my local theater was doing subbed airings as well as dubbed. I saw it dubbed both because it was more convenient (there weren't as many subbed showings) and because I prefer dubs anyway, but still. Subbed animu being shown in local theaters? What a time to be alive.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

I saw the subbed version which I normally prefer, but there's a lot of dialog and I found I was missing the Scenery Porn from all the reading. I'm going to go back and see the dubbed version later this week.

It managed to make #13 in ticket sales this last weekend, which is really good for just 288 screens.

Yeah, the landscape animation is amazing. The character animation is alright (not bad, but nothing special) but the scenery is fantastic.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

Can't believe Mitsuha was totally fine with using an ios version that's three years more complicated.

well, that and not freaking out over the date in Taki timeline

I love this movie, but I would have to second Jovian in that the actual development of romance between the leads is rather understated.

The whole losing memories immediately made an impression of the characters looking like morons until I remind myself its some time space shit about how the timelines reset and erase evidence.

That one moment in the movie that made my heart groan was when Mitsuha looks at her head to get Taki's name but all it says is "I love you".

I didn't know what to really expect from this film beyond drama (which judging by Jovian's response, makes some sense on why the film seems unfocused in term of sticking to a genre and requisite conventions), but it was really funny and and not a slog to go through.

I would totally watch one cour of Mitsuha and Taki and their friends, that was certainly a strength of the movie.

Besides the usual holy shit these backgrounds, I suspect this might not be Shinkai's strongest film, but this was my first work of his. But the OST is to die for and Radwimps did a fantastic job. I already bought it and the novel. Supposedly that and the Earthside or Bound side story novel explains more filling in narrative gaps. Based on dRoy's experience, he didn't seem impressed and I don't know if Shinkai can't write prose but I think I'll take that chance.