Your Name (Japanese: ?????, Hepburn: Kimi no Na wa.) is a 2016 Japanese animated romantic drama film written and directed by Makoto Shinkai and produced by CoMix Wave Films. The film was produced by Noritaka Kawaguchi and Genki Kawamura, with music composed by Radwimps. Your Name tells the story of a high school girl in rural Japan and a high school boy in Tokyo who swap bodies. The film stars the voices of Ryunosuke Kamiki, Mone Kamishiraishi, Masami Nagasawa, and Etsuko Ichihara. Shinkai's novel of the same name was published a month before the film's premiere.
Your Name was distributed by Toho. It premiered at the Anime Expo 2016 convention in Los Angeles, California on July 3, 2016, and in Japan on August 26, 2016. It received widespread acclaim from critics, who praised the film for its animation and emotional impact, and was also a major commercial success, becoming the fourth-highest-grossing film of all time in Japan, the 7th-highest-grossing traditionally animated film, the highest-grossing anime and Japanese film and the 5th-highest-grossing non-English film worldwide, with a total gross of more than $355 million. The film won the 49th Sitges Film Festival, 2016 Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards, and 71st Mainichi Film Awards for Best Animated Feature Film, as well as receiving a nomination for the 40th Japan Academy Prize for the Best Animation of the Year. A live-action remake is currently in the works.
Video Your Name
Plot
High school girl Mitsuha lives in the town of Itomori in Japan's mountainous Hida region. Bored, she wishes to be a handsome boy in her next life. She begins switching bodies intermittently with Taki, a high school boy in Tokyo, when they wake up. They communicate by leaving notes in Mitsuha's notebook and memos on Taki's phone, and sometimes by writing on each other's skin. Mitsuha causes Taki to develop a relationship with his coworker Miki, while Taki causes Mitsuha to become popular in school.
Taki, as Mitsuha, accompanies her grandmother and sister to leave the ritual alcohol kuchikamizake, made by Mitsuha, as an offering at the shrine on a mountaintop outside the town. The shrine is believed to represent the body of the village guardian god who rules human experiences and connections. Mitsuha's latest note tells Taki about a comet expected to pass Earth on the day of her town festival.
One day, Taki wakes up in his body. After an unsuccessful date with Miki, he tries to call Mitsuha, but cannot reach her, and the body switching ends. He decides to visit Itomori, but does not know its name, his memories of it are fading, and Mitsuha's messages have disappeared. A restaurant owner in Hida finally recognizes Itomori from Taki's sketch and tells him it was destroyed by a fragment of the comet. Taki finds Mitsuha's name in the records of fatalities and discovers the date of the disaster. He realizes their timelines were separated by three years.
Taki goes to the shrine to drink Mitsuha's kuchikamizake, hoping to reconnect with her body and warn her of the comet strike. Through a vision, Taki discovers that Mitsuha, having fallen in love with him, met his past self while trying to meet him personally. He wakes in her body on the morning of the town festival; Mitsuha's grandmother deduces his identity, and tells him the body switching is part of the Miyamizu family history as caretakers of the shrine. He convinces Mitsuha's friends Tessie and Sayaka to help evacuate the town by cutting the power and broadcasting a false emergency alert, but the plan fails. He realizes that Mitsuha must be in his body at the shrine and goes back to find her.
Mitsuha wakes up in Taki's body at the shrine. Although they sense each other's presence, they are separated by three years. However, when twilight falls, they return to their own bodies and meet. They attempt to write each other's names on their hands so they will remember each other, but twilight passes and Mitsuha disappears before she can write hers.
As Mitsuha races back to town to convince her estranged father, the Itomori mayor, to evacuate the town, her memories of Taki start to fade. She realizes that Taki wrote "I love you" on her hand instead of his name. The comet piece crashes to Earth, destroying Itomori. Taki wakes up in his own time at the shrine, remembering nothing.
Five years later, Taki has graduated from university and is searching for a job. He senses he is missing something important, and learns that inhabitants of Itomori survived by following the mayor's order. He recognizes Tessie and Sayaka in a Tokyo restaurant, now engaged, but cannot identify them, and both Taki and Mitsuha's friends and family are shown to be pursuing their own paths. One day, Taki and Mitsuha see each other when their trains draw parallel, and are compelled to disembark and search for one another, finally meeting on a staircase. Feeling they have met before, they simultaneously ask for each other's name.
Maps Your Name
Cast
Production
In Makoto Shinkai's proposal sent to Toho in September 14, 2014, the film was originally titled Yume to Shiriseba (??????, If I knew it was a dream), derived from a passage in a waka, or "Japanese poem", attributed to Ono no Komachi. Its title changed to Kimi no Musubime (??????, Your Connection) and Kimi wa Kono Sekai no Hanbun (????????????, You're half of this world) before becoming Kimi no Na Wa.
Inspiration for the story came from works including Sh?z? Oshimi's Inside Mari, Ranma ½, the Heian period novel Torikaebaya Monogatari, and Greg Egan's short story The Safe-Deposit Box.
While the town of Itomori, one of the film's settings, is fictional, the film drew inspirations from real-life locations that provided backdrop for the town. Such locations include the city of Hida in Gifu Prefecture and its library, Hida City Library.
Music
Yojiro Noda, the lead vocalist of the Japanese rock band Radwimps, composed the theme music of Your Name. Director Makoto Shinkai requested him to compose its music "in a way that the music will (supplement) the dialogue or monologue of the characters". Your Name features the following songs performed by Radwimps:
- Yumet?r? (???, "Dream Lantern")
- Zenzenzense (????, "Past Past Past Life")
- Sup?kuru (?????, "Sparkle")
- Nandemonaiya (???????, "It's Nothing")
The soundtrack of the film was well received by both audiences and critics alike and is acknowledged as being one of the factors behind its success at the box office. The film's soundtrack was the runner-up in the "Best Soundtrack" category at the 2016 Newtype Anime Awards, while the song ZenZenZense was the runner-up in the "Best Theme Song Category".
Release
The film premiered at the 2016 Anime Expo convention in Los Angeles, California on July 3, 2016, and later was released theatrically in Japan on August 26, 2016. The film is scheduled to be released in 92 countries. It was released in China by Huaxia Film Distribution on December 2, 2016. In order to qualify for the Academy Awards, the film was released for one week (December 2-8, 2016) in Los Angeles. The film was released in Australian cinemas on limited release on November 24, 2016 by Madman Entertainment in both its original Japanese and an English dub. Madman also released the film in New Zealand on December 1, 2016. The film was also released in the United Kingdom on November 18, 2016 distributed by Anime Limited. On January 17, 2017, Funimation announced that the film would be released in North American theaters on April 7, 2017.
Home media
Your Name was released in 4K UHD Blu-ray, Blu-ray, and DVD on July 26 in Japan by Toho Pictures. The release was offered in Regular, Special, and Collector's editions. FUNimation announced on July 1 at Anime Expo 2017 that the film would be released on Blu-ray and DVD by the end of 2017 but didn't specify a date. At Otakon 2017, they announced they are releasing the movie in both Standard and Limited Edition Blu-Ray + DVD Combo Packs on November 7, 2017.
In its first week, the Blu-ray standard edition sold 202,370 units, Limited First Pressing sold 125,982 units and the special edition sold 94,079 units. The DVD Standard Edition placed first, selling 215,963. Your Name is the first Anime to Place 3 BD Releases in Top 10 for 2 straight weeks.
Reception
Box office
Your Name became a huge commercial success, especially in Japan, where it grossed ¥23 billion (~US$190 million). The film achieved the second-largest gross for a domestic film in Japan, behind Spirited Away, and the fourth-largest ever, behind Titanic and Frozen. It is the first anime not directed by Hayao Miyazaki to earn more than $100 million (~?10 billion) at the Japanese box office. It topped the box office in Japan for a record-breaking 12 non-consecutive weekends. It held the number-one position for nine consecutive weekends before being toppled by Death Note: Light Up the New World in the last weekend of October. It returned to the top for another three weeks before finally being dethroned by Hollywood blockbuster Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.
The success of the film also extended beyond Japan. In China, it became the highest-grossing Japanese film in the world's second-largest movie market on December 17, 2016. It has grossed US$81.3 million in China and is the highest-grossing 2D animated film in the country. Its opening screened in over 7,000 theaters. It made an estimated $10.9 million on its opening day from 66,000 screenings and attracting over 2.77 million admissions, the biggest 2D animated opening in the country. It also held the record for the highest-grossing non-Hollywood foreign film in China, up until it was surpassed by Indian film Dangal in May 2017.
It is the highest-grossing Japanese film in Thailand, with ?44.1 million (US$1.23 million). As of December 26, the film has grossed $771,945 USD in Australia. and $95,278 USD in New Zealand. On a December 20 blog post, the Australian distributor Madman stated that the film had made over $1,000,000 AUD in the Australian box office alone before closing its limited release run. The film was number-one on its opening five days in South Korea, with 1.18 million admissions and a gross of US$8.2 million, becoming the first Japanese film since Howl's Moving Castle to reach number one in the country.
Critical response
Your Name received critical acclaim. On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 97%, based on 100 reviews, and an average rating of 8.2/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "As beautifully animated as it is emotionally satisfying, Your Name adds another outstanding chapter to writer-director Makoto Shinkai's filmography." On Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating, the film has a score 79 out of 100, based on 25 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".
Mark Schilling of The Japan Times gave the film a rating of 4 out of 5 and praised the film's animation for its "blend of gorgeous, realistic detail and emotionally grounded fantasy". However, he criticized the film's "over-deliver[y]" of "the comedy of adolescent embarrassment and awkwardness" and its ending for being "To the surprise of no one who has ever seen a Japanese seishun eiga (youth drama)".
Reception outside of Japan was also very positive. Mark Kermode called the film his ninth favourite film to be released in the United Kingdom in 2016. US reviews were mostly positive. The New York Times described it as "a wistfully lovely Japanese tale", while The Atlantic said it was "a dazzling new work of anime". Conversely, The Boston Globe had a mixed opinion of the film, saying that it was "pretty but too complicated". Mike Toole from Anime News Network listed it as the third-best anime film of all time. Ron Clements and John Musker, directors of the Oscar-nominated animation Moana, praised the film for its beauty and uniqueness.
Despite the praise he received, Makoto Shinkai insisted that the film is not as good as it could have been: "There are things we could not do, Masashi Ando [Director of animation] wanted to keep working [on] but had to stop us for lack of money ... For me it's incomplete, unbalanced. The plot is fine but the film is not at all perfect. Two years was not enough."
Accolades
American adaptation
On September 27, 2017, producer J.J. Abrams and screenwriter Eric Heisserer announced that they are working on an American remake of Your Name to be released by Paramount Pictures and Bad Robot Productions.
See also
- List of highest-grossing animated films
- List of highest-grossing anime films
- List of highest-grossing films in Japan
- Torikaebaya Monogatari
- Miko
Notes
References
External links
- Official website (in Japanese)
- Official website (US)
- Your Name on IMDb
- Your Name at Rotten Tomatoes
- Your Name at Metacritic
- Your Name (film) at Anime News Network's encyclopedia
Source of article : Wikipedia
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