Your Name is the story of two people: Mitsuha Miyamizu, a shrine maiden in the rural Japanese countryside, and Taki Tachibana, a stock standard highschool student in Tokyo. Their irregular body-swapping isn’t the sort that leaves much of a solid mark – their memories of swaps are hazy, and they can’t exactly take notes with them, and more importantly they’ve never even met. Yet here, one of the first themes Shinkai communicates comes forward – the echoes left by a person’s life, by their actions and in the people around them, is just as good as meeting the person themselves. Mitsuha and Taki both get to learn about each other not only during their body swaps, but in seeing the aftereffects of each others’ antics while swapped, be it Taki’s boldness in her body or Mitsuha’s setting up Taki’s love life in his. Love, as told by Shinkai, is more than just affection for a person – it’s in the things we do for others and what they do for us.
The core theme of Your Name is “musubi” – a word that describes coming together and growing apart, starting a journey and reaching its conclusion, and the ebb and flow of time and fate. It is a word that, perhaps, summarizes the whole of Makoto Shinkai’s stories on the topic of love and fate – it describes the insatiable urge to find the one you’re destined to be with, as explored in Voices from a Distant Star, and likewise the unavoidable flow of time that pulls people apart and leads to new beginnings, as in 5 Centimeters per Second. The topic of musubi dominates the story of Your Name, in a manner that makes the movie both coherent in its own plot and insightful in its approach to the standard “red string of fate” story.
It is difficult to put into words exactly why Your Name resonates on the threads it does (pun intended), but it has to do with the raw elegance with which the theme of musubi is presented. It encompasses both the sappy and giddy optimism of true love winning out, and the melancholy acceptance of time moving on. It perfectly describes the “why” to the red string of fate, and why that symbol holds so much power in the mind.
Of course, it goes without saying that the fundamentals of Your Name – the animation, the voice acting, and the like – are of the top quality. The name that Shinkai has made for himself and his works in regards to raw quality is strong for a reason – Your Name does not disappoint visually, or audibly. Of particular note is the ear-orgasming soundtrack, provided by RADWIMPS, who provided both the trailer music as well as several in-film songs. Rather than simply searching for music that matched his artistic vision retroactively, Makoto Shinkai sought out RADWIMPS’ inclusion in the film from the get-go, and the result of integrating them so early into the creative process is evident every time the film’s soundtrack gets going. If nothing else, Your Name is a movie that can be watched for the music.
Your Name is, if anything, a classic Makoto Shinkai work. It is beautiful, both in visuals and in story. It tugs at the heartstrings, appealing to things that every viewer can identify with, either out of personal experience or out of desire to experience. But more than anything else, it leaves the audience satisfied, throughout its runtime and in its conclusion, with a story well told. Your Name handily takes its place as not just my favorite Shinkai film, but my favorite film entirely.
