Makoto Shinkai put a lot of effort into crafting a well written, well drawn movie that was sure to pique a lot of interest. And today even 3 years later Your Name is among one of the most talked about and praised anime movies of the decade. In Shinkai's areas of expertise he really excelled at drawing something both well executed and beautiful. But in other areas, his movie loses a lot of the value and artistry it deserves. Though Your Name had a ton of potential to be a lasting and enduring piece, too much of the movie is sacrificed for the feel-good aesthetic the movie attempts to showcase.
Positively, the art and music is Your Name's greatest exhibit. Scenes of the landscapes and in betweens are thoroughly drawn and don't fail to impress. Like Shinkai's previous works, Your Name is gratifyingly well made and nudges the limit to anime as an art medium. The music wasn't too impressive to me I'll admit, but it was enjoyable enough to take note of as well. Some might say his music was more enduring than the movie itself.
Shinkai's center stage is the plot. I'd wager we've all dreamt of a show in our youths as quirky and provoking as what Shinkai had laid out in Your Name. Overall, the premise is interesting enough to learn more about. Despite the NUMEROUS plot holes and questionable moments, it still has some worth. But I'd say by the end I was a little more confused by how strangely the movie took a turn, though it definitely had potential to arrive at something truly satisfying.
What made everything so hard to appreciate, in my opinion, surely has to be the character designs. Taki and Mitsuha are both extremely unoriginal school students. I bet you had forgotten the guy's name before I had mentioned it. The Anime meta has always been to romanticize the life of a typical, normal school teenager because audiences will relate to and sympathize with them more closely. Which is fine, but there is literally no interesting aspect about either main character, so there's nothing to care about in the first place. Shinkai cleverly presents the illusion of some sort of character development by scribbling up some initial love interest and implying that Taki has changed because he's now in love with Mitsuha, but literally nothing has developed within him in the first place. If you were in that bizarre of a situation with someone at least somewhat romantically compatible I'm sure you'd fall in love too, with or without a crush. The glorification of this half baked plot isn't enough to testify why Taki or Mitsuha is any reason to care at all. If this movie featured 2 guys it'd probably lose most of its credence. I'd give Shinkai the benefit of the doubt with how he chose to write the latter half of the movie, but one could argue no matter what path they took, the characters weren't interesting enough anyway to really make a mark. This anime falls short in both plot and characters, and all that's left is really just eye grabbing content.
Overall I'd probably enjoy the movie a lot more had there been less of the plot to really be concerned about and more of the characters to resonate with, but in short Your name has at least done its job of surviving as a mediocre movie with enough points on the checklist to warrant a popular anime.
