"Gift" to the hopeless nation

Rating: 9/10 (1 November 2018)

"The disease which humans are last affected is "hope"."
This quote originated from Saint-Exupéry, the French author of "The Little Prince", is one of the sales copies of this film.
Blockbuster films always reflect an atmosphere of the era.
Once in Japan, in exchange for the energetic economy having drastically arisen by the recovery from the WWII, people had lost the relationship with others. Recently, they also released their economic advantages to other countries which has been their last resort. Moreover, tossed about by social network services targeting each person's approval desire, human relationships acceleratingly have become vacant. Nowadays, a sense of stagnation is spreading throughout the country.
Through this process, the chronic disease gradually infected people and several levels of their communities including nation, companies, men, women, young, elderly, and even children. The name of the disease is "hopeless".
In this film, a boy and a girl face the impatience that is not easily accessible to each other, quite typical in orthodox romance stories. Unlike the other ones, this irritating situation is highlighted by contrasting the spatiotemporal distance between them, and also the distance between this world and the other world derived from a Buddhism concept. This distance as best blend of these scientific and religious descriptions is the straightforward metaphor of the desperate gap between hope and hopeless in our reality.
Body switching, Sci-Fi, young romance, beautiful CGs, catchy songs, etc.... Crowd pullers are smartly packed into this film though, outstanding was its title. "Your" is the most equal word for everybody. Definitely this word sense gave sympathy to any generation, even to the elderly, thereby reminding of their own experiences: "whenever and wherever in your life, fortune can be (or could have been) encountered." This universal message could touch one's too dry mind like an oasis in a desert.
About sixty years ago just after the WWII, exactly the same titled film was also the blockbuster in Japan, when people had surely the hope to reconstruction supported by firm human relationships nevertheless in poverty. On reflection, since today's people are living in the era of a digital visualization of everything, they may retrospectively desire such an analog type of "hope".