Your Name (Dir Makoto Shinkai, 1h 42m, 2016)

Hype, particularly in a cinematic sense is a strange beast. Like any medium, the pendulum of managing expectations is a fickle one; critically maul a film and you can end up with egg on your face, as Mamma Mia and The Greatest Showman proved, prelude it with plaudits and you end up with such cinematic gems as The Phantom Menace and 2017's The Mummy. Even in the case of genuine cinematic gems, from Kane to Kurosawa, glowing plaudits and regular spaces on the perfunctory "greatest of all time" lists can lead to a film becoming almost intimidating, an Everest of cinema that the average filmgoer may feel ill-prepared or equipped to tackle. One of those films for myself personally has been, since its release in November 2016, Makoto Shinkai's Your Name, not only a film that remains the highest grossing anime film of all time, including a spectacularly lucrative appearance in western cinemas, but a critical darling, narrowly missing out on joining Studio Ghibli's exclusive club as an anime Oscar Nominee.

I bought Your Name on DVD in the summer of 2017. No doubt, I intended to watch it quickly, to catch onto that wave of western anime fervour that arguably paved the way for more screenings in the West more than any film since Spirited Away, and saw Shinkai's filmography re-released, in some cases for the first time in a decade. From his humble start via the short Voices from a Distant Star (2002), entirely animated by Shinkai himself, via speculative fiction blockbuster The Place Promised In Our Early Days (2004) to more down-to-earth, beautifully animated slow-moving realism, (Five Centimetres Per Second, (2007) and The Garden of Words (2013)), Shinkai has cut a remarkably individual path through animation, rivalling both Hayao Miyazaki and Mamoru Hosoda (Summer Wars, Yuki and Ami The Wolf Children, Mirai) as the face of anime films in the West. Without a doubt, Your Name is his masterpiece. Finally, with my stock of DVDs dwindling, I gave in, and set my sites on the mountain.

Your Name, as with much of Shinkai's filmography, has two key hallmarks. First, Shinkai's peerless cinematography, backed up with absolutely stunning animation-if you've ever seen beautifully drawn anime backdrops of Tokyo in exquisite detail, or rolling fields, or mountainous landscapes, to almost photorealistic quality, chances are it's from one of his films (they're also perhaps the hallmark of the biggest issue with his films, but I'll come to that later). The other is his narrative focus, heard loud and clear in Your Name-Shinkai's films are about personal connections. Five Centimetres a Second focuses on a group of school friends drifting apart over the years, The Place Promised in Our Early Days on a trio of friends and the struggle of two after the loss of the third, and even in his early shorts, the ideas of connections, made and broken, run through his work.

Your Name is no different, focusing on the connection between Taki (Ryunosuke Kamiki/Michael Sinterniklaas), a high school boy, working a part time job, living in Tokyo, and Mitsuha (Mone Kamishiraishi/Stephanie Sheh), living in rural Japan, who has to contend with her politician father and her role as a Shinto priestess, with the connection between them beginning, mysteriously, with a comet three years prior to the film's events leading to them changing bodies on occasion, with Taki waking up as Mitsuha, and vice-versa. It's in this opening twenty minutes or so, preluded by the film's anime opening-esque title sequence, that the film seems most surefooted, with its central conceit being neatly set up, Mitsuha first waking up post-swap to the chaos left by Taki in her body, only to wake up the following day as Taki. It's a genuinely smartly done, smartly paced series of scenes, where Shinkai's writing, his cinematography, and what he doesn't show on screen combine to create probably the most memorable moments of the film.

Here, the unspooling sense of the story is told not only through neat narrative moments, but visually-Mitsu-as-Taki waking up to reach out to where their phone should be, only to miss it and overbalance out of bed, whilst their recurring mutual embarrassment at being the opposite sex, and bewilderment at the damage left by their would-be doppelganger is a neat twist on the typical Western body-swap comedy (e.g. Freaky Friday.) Both of them, in essence, slowly come to terms, and more importantly, get to grips with living what slowly becomes a reasonable and strange life-here, especially in the English dub, where Sinterniklaas and Sheh essentially have to play two roles, and voice act a boy and a girl inhabiting each other's bodies, as well as the character proper, it is the performances that make both characters believable and empathetic.

Eventually agreeing on a series of notes between each other, left via phones, notebooks, and even via handwritten notes on hands and faces, so the duo eventually come to a strange accord with each other, with Mitsu-as-Taki setting up a date for Taki with his co-worker. When this sours, and with both beginning to realise they have feelings for each other, the connection is suddenly and unexpectedly severed. It is also here that the film takes a twist, albeit it an overtly Shinkai-typical twist, into a detective story that borders on speculative fiction. It is here, to borrow a phrase from a friend of mine (Hi, Ralph!) where the film becomes A Makoto Shinkai Film.

Let me explain. A lot of directors essentially have one key element to their film that emerges again and again, in different forms. Spielberg returns to the absent father, the supernatural in the normal, the man forced to face the extraordinary, time after time from Jaws to Jurassic Park to Ready Player One. Scorsese meditates on machismo, the Italio-American experience, and faith. Tarantino makes films from the best moments of other films. You get the idea. Some directors rearrange these pieces; some deal the same hand of cards every time with different results. Hell, Shinkai's contemporary, Mamoru Hosoda, basically remade early 2000s stalwart, Digimon: Our War Game, in the form of 2009's Summer Wars.

 "A Makoto Shinkai Film", however, skews a little bit more than simply similar elements. Cliff Notes edition? Every Shinkai Film is A Makoto Shinkai Film. Character A meets character B. Emotional bond is formed. Character B disappears, usually in mysterious circumstances. Character A is, of course, upset by this, and goes looking for them. Eventually, Character B is reunited with Character A, but they are then split apart again, usually by mysterious events, and several years later, comes across Character B, who eventually recognises Character A (or doesn't. Hey, he does have some narrative differences sometimes). All of which is beautifully, beautifully animated.

In normal cases I honestly try to avoid spoilers. Normally, a film deserves to be watched by you, the reader, before I spill its guts over the floor, and rummage through the entrails to tell you what I think of it, like some latter-day cinematic soothsayer. Here, I think it's almost perfunctory. From the very moment that bond between Mitsuha and Taki is broken, complete with beautifully done moments of the comet shooting overhead-a visual that the film returns to several times, each spectacularly executed, the film clicks onto that familiar trajectory, and slowly becomes A Makoto Shinkai Film (AMSF from now on for brevity...) Or, rather, it becomes The Makoto Shinkai Film. Every one of these moments that make up AMSF is hit so perfectly, so squarely, with just the right amount of pathos, emotionally wrought performance, both in English and Japanese, and soundtracking band, RADWIMPS going hell for leather (again, in both Japanese and English), that it honestly feels like this film renders every previous Shinkai film obsolete.

Yet, despite this being the most A Makoto Shinkai Film that ever Makoto Shinkai'd, Your Name is...strangely disappointing. For all this film's beauty, it, and much of Shinkai's filmography, feels like, in all honesty, watching someone remake the same film over and over with slightly different characters, and ever higher budgets, its visual spectacle in service to, and covering over the patches of, the same old story. This would be a pity, normally, but given what Your Name tries to do in its final act, the moment that Shinkai does try something new, where he does use his story to address perhaps the biggest single event in Japan this century, it feels almost...disappointing.

In 2011, the Japanese people, as they do every year, chose a kanji, a Japanese character, to represent the year. It was 絆, or kizuna, literally "bonds", and if one word sums up Shinkai's work, it is this word, a word that, of course is now indelibly linked with the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown at Fukushima Dia-Ichi. Japanese cinema-Japanese culture, almost-even nine years on shies away from talking about the Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami-it is, rightfully, still a politically contentious and emotionally raw topic, with only a few films covering the events and aftermath, and only Hideaki Anno, through the mouthpiece of that quintessentially Japanese symbol, Godzilla, directly addressing and confronting both the horrors of the Fukushima meltdown, and the bureaucratic ineptitude that let it happen.

Yet, Shinkai chooses Your Name to talk about it, and metaphorical as his depiction is, replacing earthquake and tsunami with falling comet, it is unmistakable. One of our protagonist attempts to save their town even as the local government mocks them for trying to evacuate the citizens, whilst the other is confronted by the carnage left behind, in a locked off and almost uncomfortably, especially from a Japanese perspective, containment zone. Through his two characters, Shinkai manages to encapsulate the sense of loss-at one point, one breaks down as they find the other's name in a list of the deceased, and the endless reports of the tragedy that they almost lose themselves in, becoming obsessed with the detail of the disaster hits uncomfortably close to home. And though the film clicks back onto the AMSF flightplan following a genuinely stunning series of animated sequences, including the searing, almost Akira-esque comet impact, for once something new, even briefly, enters the Shinkai formula, even if it all leads, frustratingly back to the same result.

The best word to describe Your Name is underwhelming. I reach the top of the mountain much quicker than I expect, and whilst it's a well-travelled one, with so many people having reached the summit, made it a successful mountain, I'd not expected the summit to appear so quickly. I turn and look and stretching off into the distance are what seem like a number of identical mountains, almost carbon copies of this one. The view is beautiful, the tour guides excellent, the mountain showered with accolades, and rightfully so. But there are so many like it, just as easily climbable, as predictable, with views just as pleasant. It's A Makoto Shinkai Mountain. I take one last look at the view, and start to walk down the mountain, in search of new cinematic peaks to climb.

That this is the most popular of Shinkai's films, that this is the highest grossing anime film of all time, that this film narrowly missed an Oscar nomination (ironic, given Hosoda's Mirai finally broke Ghibli's monopoly in 2019), that this is the film that is now a shorthand for post-Miyazaki, Post-Ghibli anime seems more fortuitous timing than cinematic quality. Your Name is, by no means, a bad film-none of Shinkai's films are, and Your Name is a well-told, beautifully animated story. But it is far from what it could be, far from what every accolade and every bit of hype suggests it would be. What it is, of course, is A Makoto Shinkai Film.

Rating: Highly Recommended