Note: This was originally just going to be a few sentences explaining my thoughts on the film, but it turned into an entire review. I guess that just shows how much I love this movie.
I finally say this film last Thursday (dubbed of course) after putting it off for a while. Going in, I didn’t think it would be that great and that it would be another movie that just didn’t live up to the hype. I thought, “Oh, this is just going to be a silly body swap movie. It will probably be good, but not worthy of being the highest grossing anime film.” I have never been so happy to be wrong. The first act of the movie was more or less what I expected to be. Well, probably better what I expected it to be actually. It does a great job of establishing and building the relationship between Taki and Mitsuha and showing how they run each other’s lives and really gets you invested in them and their situation. It also has some hilarious comedy scenes that simply play of the fact of how a boy and a girl would act in each other’s body. If the movie was just like this throughout, it would still probably be in my top 10 favorite anime films. The second act of course is when everything changes. The film starts to go in a completely different direction and this is when I really started to get hooked in (well, hooked in even more). In this part it is revealed that Mitsuha was killed, and her village destroyed, by the comet. Not only that, but it’s been like that for three years. It’s also during this part that Taki begins to have gaps in his memory about when he was in Mitsuas’s body and it’s questioned whether any of this is real in the first place, or if it was all just Taki’s imagination. This is when the film started to get to me emotionally. We’ve just been discovering Mitsuha and her life along with Taki, just to find out that it’s all gone and Taki can never see her and might not even remember her. The third and final act is easily the best. Taki is given one last chance to save Mitsuha and everyone in her village. During this part I just wanted Taki, and later Mitsuha, to succeed more than anything else. You really get a sense that they are trying their hardest to pull off this almost impossible challenge of trying to convince the town, and more importantly Mitsuha’s father, to evacuate. For a while, I thought they had failed and that their efforts were in vain. Which was undeniably the saddest part of the entire movie. When it was revealed that Mitsuha did indeed survive I was overjoyed. It was one of the greatest payoffs I’ve ever seen in a movie. At the end, we discover that eight years have passed and Mitsuha and Taki have forgotten all about what has happened all of those years ago. I was afraid this was how it was going to end with them never seeing each again. During the final scene when they finally do see each other again and ask for “Your Name” I was so happy. Definitely one of the best endings to a film I’ve watched. The story wasn’t the only great part of this movie though, I must also comment the the amazing animation. The animation is just beautiful. It also does a good job of helping to convey the emotion of the scene, like becoming extra beautiful and detailed during a heartbreaking scene or becoming more simplified and cartoony during a comedic scene. If I had to choose one minuscule thing about this movie to complain about though, it would be that I’m not of biggest fan of Shinkai’s style of using heavy digital effects for things such as lighting. It still looks good, but it’s not as appeasing to me as, for example, the hand-drawn style of most of Miyazki’s films. Last of all, the final thing that puts everything in this film together is the music. There aren’t many movies I’ve seen that I wanted to buy the soundtrack to, but Your Name is one of the exceptions. The music was composed by the band Radwimps, who I’ve never heard of until now. Like the animation, the music does an excellent job at expressing the emotion that’s supposed to be felt during the scene in a way that few movies do. It’s also catchy as heck. I’ve been listening to the four main songs almost nonstop since I saw the movie. Also, the dub has the songs in English, something that doesn’t happen too often with anime. Overall, Your Name was absolutely brilliant. It sent me on a roller coaster of emotions that have felt while watching a movie in a long time. From joy, to sadness, to excitement, to anger, to suspense, to wonder, and to awe. Besides the soundtrack, I’m also going to buy the novel, the novel midquel, and the manga when they come out. For a while now, I’ve slowly been watching less and less anime, but Your Name has reminded me why I got into the fandom in the first place. It is, without a shadow of a doubt, the greatest movie that I have ever seen
Submitted October 22, 2017 at 11:40PM by azerbajani http://ift.tt/2xXCDfn
