Hold onto that feeling

Rating: 9/10 (29 August 2017)

Just a small town girl, living in a lonely world. Just a city boy...
No, wait. Hear me out.
Granted, it's initially hard to sell Your Name - a meet cute anime twist on Freaky Friday - as a worthwhile recipient of its considerable, well-deserved hype, rather than a big screen, big budget rendition of Fruits Basket. But the hype is real. Inauspicious or not, writer/director Makoto Shinkai's film is somewhat of a genre-bending game changer - a film so special that the struggle to properly do justice to it leaves me resorting to inelegantly cherrypicking from a slew of contemporary allusions (the elegant loneliness of Murakami; the mischievous whimsy of Wong-Kar Wai; an Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind interwoven with The Breakfast Club with the most imperceptible pinch of your average buddy cop comedy comedy for spice), while it is still far more than the sum of their parts. In short, it's one of the most unexpected, simple but profound, entrancing, and poetically beautiful films to cross screens in years. It's as fun as it is melancholy, as unforgettable as it is sweetly unassuming. Even better - it's that rare anime where comparisons to Studio Ghibli aren't simply lip service, but actually warranted in terms of exquisite, painstaking heart and attention to detail. Yes, really.
But such lofty praise is actually far from the spirit of a film that goes about its remarkable business with a cheeky subtlety. Shinkai wisely plays off the initial silliness of his concept, with the early body swap sequences staying rooted in lighter, bawdier humour, playfully portrayed with a springy, sassy wit keeping even the broadest moments no less human and adorable for their broadness. The conceit itself is kept indifferently vague, apart from the haziest of nods to traditional spirituality - it's not the 'how' that matters here anywhere near as much as the 'what.' Similarly, there's a clearly delineated dichotomy between the two protagonists' 'tradition vs. modernity' milieus (with larger, extrapolating themes of supplanting history and cultural longing spanning generations to be teased out by those keen enough), but Shinkai is content to let the contrast sit, rather than milking it for shoehorned theme, or garish social commentary.
More than anything, the film captures that ethereal but omnipresent sense of vague dissatisfaction, longing, and persistent but directionless striving that is bound to feel almost achingly familiar to any given audience member, regardless of age, nationality, or standing in life. Shinkai takes a distressingly familiar sense of ennui, and infuses it with a melancholy grace, a feeling accentuated hugely by the film's simply gorgeous, sweeping artwork, infusing panoramas of mountain-dwarfed Japanese countrysides and bustling Tokyo skyscrapers with an unbelievable level of composition and care. When the film glissandos into a third-act twist that is as devastating as it is unpredictable for all but the most eagle-eyed of viewers, it transcends into a piece of larger-than-life folklore, conjuring an almost feverishly heightened viewership that redefines magnetic, before culminating with a quiet grace note that ties up the emotional knot in ways both elegiac and unforgettably uplifting. It may sound like a perennial squall of emotional peaks and valleys, but Shinkai surfs it with nonchalant poise, with his rock-steady pacing lending the film an almost uncanny gestalt. Upon the arrival of the closing credits, don't be surprised to hear a wet gasp, equal parts tearful and jubilant, erupting from your throat, unsolicited. You won't be alone in doing so.
If there are any imperceptible faults to be found, it's that Shinkai's perhaps inevitable leaning on anime tropes do, at times, dip the film into conventions it would normally nimbly leap over. The occasional conflict-expanding plot device or bombastic musical interlude, particularly in gearing up for the film's climax, strain convention in ways that are only startling in their inconsistency with the film's customary elegance, while lead actors Mone Kamishiraishi and Ryûnosuke Kamiki, while both lending credibly commanding voices, are as hyperbolic as they come in their grunts, gasps, and other verbalizations reacting to their bizarre circumstances.
Still, these are the faintest blemishes on the face of a truly beautiful, touching film, that truly demonstrates that the affective potential of traditional animation still has many wrinkles of uncanny power yet to unfurl. So do yourself a favour: believe the hype. Invest in Your Name. If you have any space amidst the ensuing deluge of feelings, you may just thank yourself you did.
-9.5/10