https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0T7X4JdgwA
in 2016 there was one movie that was on every otaku’s mind, Your Name.
your name has replaced spirited away as the highest-grossing animated film of all time, with many people saying director, Makoto Shinkai will be the next Hayao Miyazaki
Despite the acclaim, Your Name’s storyline is not straightforward. Events are told out of order, which can add to the twisted plot. That’s where we come in. In this video, we will be recapping the events of Your Name in chronological order to help (to) demystify some details audience members may find when watching this amazing film. Plus, we’ll look at the cultural impact this film has had since its release. Since this is a recap, there will be spoilers if it wasn’t already apparent by now.
[Music]
Before Your Name went on to gain so much acclaim, Makoto Shinkai had a few different names for the film before settling on Your Name. Production of this film went back to 2014, and in his initial proposal to Toho Animation, the film was first called I Knew It From a Dream. This was a reference to the Japanese poem Your Connection by Ono no Komachi. The other possible title Shinkai had considered was You Are Half of This World before settling on Your Name.
Shinkai was inspired by other anime like Ranma ½ and Inside Mary, as well as the classic Japanese poem Torii Kebaya Monogatari. But perhaps one of the greatest influences came from Christopher Nolan’s 2014 Interstellar, which makes sense given the story’s themes of love transcending great distances like time and space. The film was first released at Anime Expo in July of 2016 before it was shown in Japan in August of that same year. It would get a wider North American release and a dubbed version by Funimation in 2017.
Your Name’s release was massive, to say the least. On release, this film made up 10% of Japan’s total box office. Your Name was the second-highest-grossing animated film in Japan behind Spirited Away and would soon surpass that by earning a gross box-office amount of 23 billion yen, or 109 million dollars. This has earned Shinkai the often unwanted title of “the next Miyazaki.” Still, the response to Your Name has been positive, with its blend of amazing visuals and locations. Makoto Shinkai stepped into his own with this film, which would only bolster him further to release his next film, Weathering with You, which is currently out now.
Despite this high praise and positive reviews, there is no such thing as a perfect movie. A note both viewers and critics have brought up is that the plot of Your Name is a little convoluted. This is not to the film’s detriment at all, but it can take a second viewing to fully follow the timeline of events.
If something happens to the detriment of something or to a person’s detriment, it causes harm or damage to them. [usu PHR after v] [Formal]
Children spend too much time on schoolwork, to the detriment of other activities.
孩子把太多的时间用于做作业，影响了他们参加其他活动。
The film presents its events out of order, and to make things even more complicated, our two main characters spend a majority of the movie at different times. Mitsuha exists in a small city of Itomori three years in the past, and Taki lives in Tokyo three years ahead. Well, actually they’re the same age, but they switch bodies three years apart from one another. And, well, you can see how that can be complicated.
So, I think we should just start where it all began. Our film begins with our two main characters, Mitsuha and Taki, reciting a cryptic yet poignant message:
“Once in a while when I wake up, I find myself crying. The dream I must have had I can never recall, but the sensation that I’ve lost something lingers for a long time after I wake up. I’m always searching for something, for someone. This feeling has possessed me, I think, from that day when the stars came falling. It was almost as if a scene from a dream. Nothing more, nothing less than a beautiful view.”
This is said while the comet flies over Itomori, but actually, this event takes place near the middle of the film. Our film actually began 1,200 years ago when a comet first appeared and struck the earth, creating the lake that Itomori would be built upon. This comet would come again, spelling disaster when it strikes.
Fast-forward to our movie’s timeline, and Mitsuha’s mother dies. This would lead to her father abandoning his family and his duties to the Shinto shrine that they have been entrusted with. Instead, he goes into politics and becomes the mayor of Itomori. Needless to say, this strains his relationship with his family, most importantly with Mitsuha. Abandoned by their father and left without a mother, Mitsuha and her sister would then be raised by their grandma and be taught the traditions of the shrine, including how to make kuchikamizake, or mouth-chewed sake, which is made by chewing rice and then spitting it out to let it ferment into sake.
When Mitsuha grows up, she and her sister perform the ceremony to create kuchikamizake. This would play an integral part in connecting Taki and Mitsuha later on and is perhaps the key that ends up saving the town of Itomori. Some of the townies watch Mitsuha’s ritual and make little snide remarks about the weird old traditions. Flustered and sick of living in this backwater town, Mitsuha declares she wants nothing more than to move away from the big city. She wants to live in Tokyo, and in some cosmic sense, she gets exactly what she wants.
This is where the first body switch between Taki and Mitsuha takes place. In the film, this is shown earlier, but it actually happens later. You see, Taki and Mitsuha are not only two different people living in two different places, with Taki living in Tokyo and Mitsuha living in Itomori, but also different times. When they switch bodies, Mitsuha is taking Taki’s body three years into the future. During this first switch, they have no idea who the other person is and believe that it’s all a dream. As such, the two teens kind of treat this as a dream, unknowingly embarrassing the other in their respective lives. When Mitsuha switches back, her family and friends are all worried about her and wonder if she’s alright. Mitsuha’s friends fill her in about how odd she was acting and how she forgot all about her locker and how to do her hair. It seems to her that what she experienced might not have been a dream after all.
This causes Mitsuha to track down Taki and meet him. There’s just one problem. When Mitsuha and Taki switched bodies, it was three years into the future. In Mitsuha’s present, Taki has no idea who Mitsuha is. She finally tracks him down on the subway, but because they had not switched bodies yet in his timeline, he doesn’t recognize her. Her last effort to make a connection to Taki is to give him her red ribbon she uses to tie up her hair. When she does, she tells him her name, Mitsuha. This helps establish their bond to one another.
[Music]
Mitsuha returns home just in time for the festival her hometown throws every year. During the festival, the comet from before appears. Remember the beginning of the movie when our two characters recited that little poem? This is when that takes place, and as the comet splits apart, the unthinkable happens. Mitsuha and all of Itomori are lost when the comet strikes Earth. Mitsuha dies.
What happens next really tests the bounds of space-time. Three years pass, and Taki finds himself in Mitsuha’s body. This is an alternate timeline before Mitsuha dies, but before Taki and her meet. These switches happen for several weeks and about twice a week at random. The common trigger, though, is sleep. When Taki goes to bed, sometimes he’ll wake up as himself, and sometimes he’ll wake up as Mitsuha. During this point in the film, Taki and Mitsuha get to know each other more by experiencing each other’s lives. They develop their own little system of communicating. Mitsuha leaves notes in Taki’s diary for him to read when he returns to his body.
After a while, Taki wants nothing more than to meet this girl he’s been body-swapping with. If only he knew where she lived. He gathers her surroundings and makes sketches of the town, but it never really occurred to him to ask what the name of her town is. The switches soon stopped as Mitsuha died in her timeline, and Taki wants to find out more about the girl he’s been switching with. He takes his friends, and they journey into the Japanese countryside. Taki soon discovers the fate of Itomori, the town that was destroyed three years ago when the comet fell. The journal entries Mitsuha left also delete themselves off Taki’s phone. Any trace of this girl’s existence is gone, except for the red ribbon Taki kept wrapped around his wrist.
From there, Taki learns about the tragedy of Itomori: how many people died and just how much destruction the comet left after it struck the town that day. How Taki forgot such a monumental event is kind of astounding, but even so, Taki’s journey ends here. The girl he’s had in his mind and has been developing a relationship with is dead, and there’s nothing else he can do. Or could he?
On the last day Taki was in Mitsuha’s body, he remembers a shrine he visited that housed something belonging to Mitsuha’s family. He didn’t know exactly where it was, but he knew it would have a clue as to what he could do. After some searching, he finds the shrine nestled at the center of a crater left behind from when a comet hit Japan thousands of years ago, but it’s a separate comet from the one that made the lake at Itomori and the one that killed Mitsuha. Inside the shrine, Taki finds