I was beyond stoked to finally get a chance to watch Your Name in theatres this month.
I have heard nothing but praise for this film since it first showed at Anime Expo last year.
Several of my friends have said that it's their favourite anime film of all time,
and MyAnimeList seems to think that it's the greatest anime of all time, period.
And I can tell you, having seen it, that it actually does live up to a lot of that hype.
This film is capital-G gorgeous and amazingly well-animated,
and Makoto Shinkai has really upped his storytelling game from Garden of Words.
But none of that really matters because the film has a freaking great OP
that drew me in better than the opening of almost any film that I've seen in the last DECADE.
I am so excited about that that I'm not even going to shill before jumping into my analysis.
Well, unless telling you that I've updated my Patreon with a bunch of new rewards
including access to my scripts and bloopers and special access to my Discord channel,
which I'll link to in the doobly-doo,
counts as shilling.
My producers are telling me that it does.
Well, in that case, I'll save the rest of that spiel for the end of this video.
For now, let's talk about that intro, starting with the movie's fantastic cold open,
which means I have to give you guys a spoiler warning,
since this OP kind of gives away the whole plot of the film.
The film opens on a quiet shot of a meteor breaking through the clouds
and falling toward a quiet lakeside town.
It's a strikingly beautiful image, reminiscent, in a way, of the Disney CG castle intro,
but the lack of music and the way that the wind abruptly cuts out gives it an ominous vibe.
Which makes sense, given that, as we learn later in the movie,
this meteor destroys Itomori, the town below.
We then hard-cut to our two lead characters, who we don't know yet,
monologue-ing about how it feels as though there's something missing from their lives.
We're given a few hints of what that something is as they go about their days in Tokyo.
Both of them stare at their right hands when they wake up,
which is where they were supposed to write their names at the film's climax
but instead chose to write "I love you,"
and we see the girl, Mitsuha, tying her hair with the braided red cord
that she gives to the boy, Taki, in the middle of the film.
But while this foreshadowing grabs your attention,
you might miss the film's brilliant environmental storytelling at work.
Throughout the film, Makoto Shinkai tells us a lot about his characters by showing us how they keep their rooms.
For instance, young Taki's studious nature and architectural ambitions are plain as day
from the sketches pinned to his walls and the books piled around his room.
And that's true even in this short intro:
we can tell from the fact that Taki keeps his briefcase next to his bed
that his work schedule must be pretty full and leave him without a lot of down time.
And the stack of books next to his desk shows that he still loves reading.
This also echoes the first shot that we see of Mitsuha waking up in his body
once we get into the story proper.
Meanwhile, Mitsuha's apartment, which we see a bit more of, is cluttered but clean.
She clearly goes to great efforts to make her home feel like a home, rather than a sterile Tokyo apartment.
She brought a bit of the country with her when she moved here.
Also, let's take a second to appreciate on a purely technical level how great the compositing is in this film.
The way that the light hits everything in this scene, even the hyper-detailed background,
is incredibly natural and realistic.
This is impressive stuff.
The monologue continues as the two go to work and we see them surrounded by people.
The shifting crowds and crisscrossing trains give us a solid sense of the hustle and bustle of the city
and the seeming impossibility of finding one person in that crowd,
of rediscovering what they've lost.
We end on them both riding the subway and looking out the window
right before another cut back to the day the meteor fell.
This cut is made a little softer because Mitsuha's voice-over continues into the black screen.
It also happens right at the moment in their train ride when they see each other
and frames the entire movie as a flashback,
their memories, or at least the feelings associated with them,
flooding back to them in the instant they make eye contact.
This torrent of emotion is captured perfectly in two stunning shots of Taki and Mitsuha
staring up at the passing comet,
shots that are entirely meant to overwhelm you with their beauty:
nothing more and nothing less than a beautiful view.
And damn, do they ever work on that front.
I've seen Makoto Shinkai accused of style-over-substance filmmaking,
but here, the style IS the substance.
The sense of awe, the intangible emotional pang you get
when you see something this colourful, vibrant, and beautiful is, in part, what the film is about.
The beautiful imagery gets you in the same head space as the characters.
And later, when he takes that colour and beauty away, it has an almost numbing effect.
Speaking of beauty, the film's theme song by Radwimps kicks up here,
sweeping you up in all of its soft rock glory.
And it's hard to put into words why exactly,
but something about the way that this music is timed with a cut to and away from the title is just SO satisfying.
There's nothing fancy about it, but the timing and the use of blackness just grabs your attention.
Cut to Taki and Mitsuha finding each other in a bustling crowd in the middle of a white void.
This imagery suggests that they were lucky to ever encounter each other in the first place,
considering how many people there are out there,
and that idea is reflected in this later shot of Taki running around alone,
frantically trying to find Mitsuha in that same crowd.
The faded, de-satured look of the people creates the impression that they're forgettable,
just like most of the people you pass on the street every day.
And this kind of stylization is very common in anime, but it also speaks to the specific themes of this movie.
In Taki and Mitsuha's respective memories,
the other has faded into the back of their mind, like one of these random passerby,
which actually makes it possible for the movie to sneak Mitsuha into the background of this shot
... maybe.
See, this girl here behind Taki could very well be Mitsuha.
She has the same haircut that Mitsuha had after taking the braided cord out of her hair,
and her bag is also the only red element in the entire background scene,
red and white being Mitsuha's major signifying colours across every iteration of her character design.
And out of all of the characters in the background, she is the only one who isn't walking
but IS animated.
In fact, it looks as though she stops walking and turns her head slightly
at the exact moment that Taki stops running.
If this isn't Mitsuha herself, then this girl represents the vague notion of her
that was left in Taki's mind after he forgot about her.
Some of the details are a little off and she's hard to spot,
but there are a few elements that subtly bring Mitsuha to mind when you look at her.
Especially when you watch this OP over and over again like an obsessive crazy person.
Anyway, between the two of them finding each other in this crowd and Taki losing Mitsuha,
there's this shot of the two of them under the moon, first in Mitsuha's time, then in Taki's.
And though you'll miss it the first time you watch it, they clearly give away one of the movie's big twists here:
that Taki and Mitsuha are actually switching bodies across a three-year gap in time.
Middle school Taki is noticeably shorter than Mitsuha,
which is a little weird, considering that he's a little bit taller than her when they actually meet on the train,
and her height doesn't change at all as Taki jumps forward to high school age.
If you're paying attention, this is going to at least strike you as a little weird right away,
although, without context, it is hard to place their ages.
We also see the braided cord, representing the flow of time and their connected fates,
break free of Mitsuha's hair to float around them,
although as they break apart, it is pulled with them and disappears.
After going their separate ways, they look back for a second, timed with a hitch in the music,
and then we cut to Taki desperately searching for Mitsuha.
After the running scene, we see a breathtaking animated time lapse of a Tokyo sunrise
which must have taken a crazy amount of time and effort, so I can't blame them for using it twice in the film,
and the we see Taki through a series of jump cuts as he wanders aimlessly through Tokyo,
missing something, but unsure of what it is.
Interestingly, in this one shot,
they were able to get the licence to use the names and branding for all of the different shops in Shibuya,
Tower Records included.
Japanese licensing is a complicated thing, so that couldn't have been easy
and I appreciate the effort to give the movie that little bit of added real-world fidelity.
As time speeds on, Taki's attention is drawn toward the sky, where the comet is now conspicuously absent,
but this still creates the impression that he's getting a little closer to finding Mitsuha again.
We also see two important landmarks here:
first the train station where he will eventually meet her again,
and then a crosswalk bridge, which is where he ends his disastrous first date with Miki
and where he just barely misses Mitsuha that one winter evening.
The music slows down and we cut to a shot of Mitsuha slumped next to one of the devices used to braid cords
at her family's shrine.
In a beautifully-animated close shot, we see her looking wistfully at the cord,
which represents her connection to Taki.
In contrast to the other times that we see this red cord, it's limp and lifeless here.
She gets a brief flash of the moment that she tried to write her name on Taki's hand,
but it's gone just as quickly, and she's left with that feeling of profound, unplaced longing.
In a whip cut, we see her bury that feeling as she performs her duties as a shrine maiden.
The amount of detail that goes into this one short dance is just incredible.
Everything is painstakingly animated, from her jingling Kagura suzu bells
to the tiny gold tassels on her headdress.
I know you've heard this movie is beautiful, but words and screenshots really don't do it justice.
She thrusts her suzu bells forward,
and we cut to her walking back from leaving her offering at the shrine in the underworld
with her sister and grandmother.
This is then followed by two beautiful landscape shots:
one of the sun breaking through the clouds in Tokyo,
symbolizing Taki making progress towards finding Mitsuha,
and the other of Itomori at sunset.
The god rays are pointing in the same direction in both shots,
which helps to make these two scenes feel connected.
Next, we see both of them looking up at the sky with their backs to each other.
The vertical credit for Radwimps creates a hard visual divide between the two of them,
further reinforcing the disconnect between them at this point.
I really love it when OPs include their titles in the visual composition in this manner.
It's not integrated into the world like you see in something like JoJo,
but the shot would be lesser without the credit in it.
We're then treated to a beautiful and inventive time lapse
that encapsulates the pair's entire relationship over the course of the film.
We see every iteration of them, including the brief moment on that snowy evening when they cross paths.
And the attention to detail even here is stunning:
their expressions perfectly encapsulate how they feel about each other at any given moment.
First they're suspicious, then fond of each other,
and then they lose each other and they're left with a sense of longing as their memories fade.
Even the weather changes as time goes on,
from rain to depressing snow to cherry blossoms,
suggesting hope for the future when their sense of loss is at its most painful.
Then, in the OP's single-most stunning shot,
we zoom from Taki's apartment in Tokyo all the way to Mitsuha's house in Itomori,
with a flash of light disguising both a jump back in time
and a transition to a much-less-detailed 3D map of Tokyo and the land beyond its tower.
The camera's moving really fast here, and they had to save a bit of their budget somewhere.
The awestruck look on Mitsuha's face speaks to the profundity of the connection between the two of them.
The meaning of this shot is pretty simple,
but the sheer amount of detail and the number of parallax layers in Tokyo alone is just INSANE.
Even with computers, making this look good took a LOT of effort and time.
In the final shots, we see both Taki and Mitsuha reaching up toward the clouds
and, it's implied, toward each other.
Now, it's worth noting that from the angle and general shape of these clouds,
it's very clear that they are not the same cloud,
a further hint at the disconnected time periods.
They reach out to each other with looks of longing on their face
in two beautiful close shots that mirror one another.
Then the longing changes to knowing smiles,
as though in this moment, they're both sure that they'll see each other again one day.
I think this represents their twilight meeting at the edge of the underworld.
Smiling, they part ways, running off toward their own futures,
and we are likewise reassured that they will meet again.
The braided red cord on Taki's wrist and in Mitsuha's hair connects the two of them,
taking the form of the invisible red thread of fate that is said to tie fated lovers together
in many East Asian legends.
This doesn't have quite as significant a meaning to a Western audience,
but to someone watching this in Japan or a viewer who's seen a lot of anime,
this makes it very clear that these two are destined to be reunited.
And Shinkai makes good on this promise,
giving us an unambiguously happy ending for the first time in his miserable goddamn life.
But how you start a movie is arguably even more important than how you end it.
You only have a few minutes to capture your viewers' heart, get them invested in your characters and world,
and get them on board for the story that you want to tell.
And this OP does a beautiful job of that.
Your Name is one hell of a ride from beginning to end,
and if you haven't seen it yet, well, I'm sorry for spoiling it for you,
but I did warn you at the beginning of this video.
But also, I cannot recommend it enough.
Like the works of Miyazaki and Satoshi Kon, people are going to be talking about this one for a long damn time.
And also A Silent Voice, if early reports are to believed,
so I guess now we have to wait for that one to come out in the theatre.
Great.
Well, when it does, if you want to see me cover it,
or if you want to see me do some more scene analysis of Your Name,
because man, I love this movie,
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If you really enjoy what I do and you want to help me do more of it,
or you just want a peek behind the scenes,
I urge you to check out my Patreon page,
which has recently been updated with new rewards for almost every tier.
I'm uploading all of my scripts for patrons to read,
including scrapped video projects and a few other secret goodies.
And I'll be doing monthly blooper reels featuring my best flubs from on camera and in the recording booth.
There will also be monthly giveaways for patrons and discounts on my merch store,
when I finally get that up and running.
And that's all in addition to the great rewards that my patrons already get,
like special access to my Discord server, joining me for monthly anime nights,
voting on topics for the Weekly Weebcast, and having their names included in the credits of these videos,
which—hey, look at that—you're seeing right now.
If you want to hear me talk some more about great filmmaking and anime,
then check out this video, where I analyze one of the best scenes in the best anime of the last decade.
Or you can click down here for a tear-down of a much, much worse film than Your Name.
But if this is the last I see of you today,
then I'm Geoff Thew, professional shitbag, signing out from my mother's basement.