Something to watch tonight: Monday 4 December

Your Name. (Shinkai, 2016)

We are big fans of the animé dir­ect­or Makoto Shinkai in this house and on Saturday night we got to re-watch his 2016 clas­sic Your Name. in a recent 4K UHD col­lect­ors edi­tion from Madman (now out of stock it would appear).

The film is like a dis­til­la­tion of all of Shinkai’s obses­sions – fantasy and sci-fi, young people fall­ing in love and attempts to wrestle con­trol back from a nat­ur­al dis­aster (or oth­er exist­en­tial threat) that makes us feel powerless.

This is also a body-swap film, but a body-swap film with a twist.

Bored small-town teen­ager Mitsuha wishes she had the excit­ing life she ima­gines a teen­age boy in Tokyo might live and one day that dream comes true. She and Taki from Tokyo peri­od­ic­ally switch bod­ies – and lives – and even­tu­ally work out how to send mes­sages to each oth­er to pre­vent social disaster.

When the mes­sages from Mitsuha stop as sud­denly and inex­plic­ably as they star­ted, Taki travels across coun­try to try and find her, real­ising in the pro­cess that they weren’t just trav­el­ling spa­cially, they were also trav­el­ling in time – a three-year dis­tance – and the frag­ments of a fall­ing comet have dev­ast­ated the vil­lage where she lives.

Only a spe­cial kind of magic will allow him to revis­it her body and per­suade her to warn the com­munity of the impend­ing threat, and thus save hun­dreds of lives includ­ing her own.

Shinkai’s recent work is fam­ous for its accur­acy to time and place. If you’ve ever vis­ited Japan, you’ll feel a deep sense of famili­ar­ity and peace watch­ing his films. Here’s an art­icle from a blog­ger who has cre­ated a kind of pil­grim­age around Tokyo to loc­a­tions from the film. You’ll see why it is that Your Name. is so beloved by fans.

Ever since it came out in 2016, there have been per­sist­ent rumours of a live action remake from JJ Abrams’ Bad Robot com­pany but we have been wait­ing an awfully long time for it. Best to go back and watch the animé once again. It’s glorious.

Where to find Your Name.

Aotearoa: Blu-ray from Madman Entertainment, digit­al rent­al from AroVision or Apple

Australia: Blu-ray from Madman Entertainment, digit­al rent­al from AroVision, Apple or Amazon

USA: Streaming on Crunchyroll

UK: Digital rent­al from the usu­al outlets

Further reading

For RNZ, I reviewed one of Shinkai’s later films (Weathering With You) and one of his earli­er ones (The Place Promised in Our Early Days). His most recent film, Suzume, came out in cinemas last year but hasn’t made it to home video yet.