But something darker lurks in this dazzling tale, with the spectre of a rainbow-coloured sky threatening to fall upon the star-crossed couple who have become so close yet remain so distant.Īlthough its inspirations can be traced back to the late Heian-period tale Torikaebaya Monogatari, Your Name is a bristlingly modern affair with a J-pop soundtrack by teen favourites Radwimps and a mainstream cult sensibility that blends the fairytale charms of Hiromasa Yonebayashi’s 2014 adaptation of When Marnie Was There with the existential angst of Donnie Darko. For a while, the peculiar arrangement proves a boon to both, with boy and girl learning about each other’s lives and subtly altering their own accordingly. Meanwhile in Itomori, Taki takes Mitsuha’s place, their spirits swapping back and forth at random, facilitating the need for smartphone messages to keep each other abreast of their oddly intimate adventures.
Teen audiences in search of a “relatable” love story will find this every bit as accessible as Romeo + Juliet One day, her wish comes true, as Mitsuha appears to awaken in Tokyo in the body of teenager Taki, a diffidently attractive young man who promptly starts to explore his “feminine side”. “Please make me a handsome Tokyo boy in my next life!” she pleads, while performing her Shinto temple duties, which include the kuchikami ritual of making sake with spit and braiding kumihimo cords, representing the strange interweaving of time and space, of gods and men. In the remote mountain town of Itomori, high-school girl Mitsuha longs for another, more exciting existence. We open with a meteor shower, on “that day when the stars came falling, like a dream… a shared dream”. Yet this rip-roaring, heartbreaking YA adventure is very much its own beast, as different from Miyazaki’s ageless Studio Ghibli animations as it is from live-action western romps such as Freaky Friday, The Hot Chick and It’s a Boy Girl Thing or, perhaps more pertinently, from Nobuhiko Ôbayashi’s 1982 Japanese hit, Tenkōsei. Revisiting themes of longing and separation that became his signature in films such as 5 Centimeters Per Second (2007) and The Garden of Words (2013), Shinkai’s fifth feature has confirmed the writer-director as a major talent, duly dubbed “the new Miyazaki”. But in the interim, an heir apparent has emerged in the shape of Makoto Shinkai, whose breathtaking body-swap romance Your Name has dominated the Japanese box office for months. Last week, Miyazaki revealed that 2019 may in fact see the completion of a full-length version of his short-film project, Boro the Caterpillar. “I feel like I’m always searching for someone…” Ever since the animation legend Hayao Miyazaki announced (perhaps prematurely) that 2013’s The Wind Rises was to be his final feature, fans have been searching for a successor to his artistic throne.
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