If sappy love stories with magical realism are your thing

Rating: 5/10 (22 September 2016)

With "Your Name" storming up to MAL's top, I had to check it out for myself and experience this phenomenon, that has a score of 9,40 out of 10 at the time of writing. With so many people agreeing, that it's a masterpiece, it has to be good, right? Well turns out I didn't enjoy it quite as much the majority of MAL users.
Plot: The story starts fair enough. Our main character suffers from "Disney princess syndrome"; she's not satisfied with the surroundings she was born in and wants to see the world, that is so much bigger than what she knows. Luckily for her, magical realism is a thing in her world as well. Out of nowhere she gets the chance to live out her dreams by switching bodies with a boy from Tokyo every now and then. The boy, turns out to be the other main character. This sounds like the basic story, in which our lead learns, that "every place is beautiful, but home is still best" or that everybody has troubles in their life, no matter where they come from. The set up definitely has some potential, since the main characters parallel each other in an interesting way and they're pretty well characterized. But that doesn't turn out to be the case with "Your Name". The writer was far more ambitious than to just recycle the classic body switch plot. About halfway the movie switches into a pretty convoluted romance story, that just doesn't work, because the whole second half is built around wanting to give the audience the "feels". Don't get me wrong, I like a good romance or a good tragedy as much as anyone else, but if it all feels as contrived and transparent as in this movie's case, I won't be able to jump on the feel train. The climax was a pretty interesting idea, but was pretty inconsistently build up, where things worked out way too conveniently to be believable.
Characters: I've already addressed it in the previous section, that I found the characterization of the characters pretty good. With the exception of the self-absorbed and ambitious father almost all felt pretty lively. Unfortunately characters can at time's be only as good as the plot allows them to be. This shows especially with the side characters, who at times just conveniently join into the plot, even if it doesn't make much sense. Same goes for our leads, they're pretty fun at first, but as soon as the plot starts becoming contrived and convoluted, I no longer found them as likable.
Art: The art and animation were pretty good, but it was pretty standard in terms of style.
Sound: Just like the plot the sound was also heavy into making you feel stuff and to be fair it did resonate with me somewhat. Interestingly there were a lot of pop songs instead of the more typical choice of instrumentals.
Plot: 50% (4/10) Characters: 30% (6/10) Art: 10% (8/10) Soundtrack: 10% (8/10)
Score: 5/10