On today’s “Roast or Recommend” I will be looking at the anime film titled “Your Name”
This anime film came out in 2016. It was taken very well by most everybody that saw it, and it has reached major popularity in both Japan and the west, even almost three years after its initial showing.
This film follows two people, Taki and Mitsuha, who randomly switch bodies at any given time. But they don’t remember what they did when they switched bodies as it is registered to them as just a dream, and dreams are often forgotten when a person wakes up. It also follows the journey these characters take to meet each other in their lives.
This anime movie is absolutely stunning to look at. It is a visual masterpiece, though that doesn’t even do it justice. Being a movie, the budget and time are greater. Therefore, the quality of the art and animation is far greater than anime series that have an episode each week.
You can tell they take a great amount of time, effort and care in every scene. The camera panning, the lighting, the detailed backgrounds, the character designs and just about everything else is done with the utmost quality. It is a delight to look at as nothing is shirked on with the art and animation.
Being a less than 2 hour movie, the characters cannot be fleshed out as much as most people would like, but they fix this to a degree by introducing a relatively low amount of characters. The two main characters are obviously given the most development, but the other supporting characters aren’t fully blank slates.
The only issue I have here is that Mitsuha definitely sees more development and screen time than Taki. Mitsuha is given more time to shine than Taki. So, she is more interesting by default there. This kind of bummed me because I think the whole thing would have felt stronger had we seen more of Taki’s backstory and his drive and life. We saw a lot of that for Mitsuha, but not so much for Taki.
The story is beautiful as well. Without spoiling anything, the story is layered, dynamic and takes plenty of twists along the way.
The beauty of it, however, might be the sequencing of it. The story starts off innocently enough with some funny and charming moments that make you feel good. But later on towards the middle part of it, it just punches you in the gut and breaks your emotional stability. It lets you up gently only to knock you down hard. It is nicely down, and it really throws you for a loop.
The one thing the story doesn’t do is explain why the body swapping is happening specifically. It doesn’t give explicit answers to the mystical and magical going on, but I don’t think it has to. I usually like being given those explanations, but in this movie, the why is not important. What’s more important is how it impacts the characters and what are they going to do to get through it.
In addition to that, the story isn’t about the supernatural. That element is placed in there as a catalyst for everything else the movie is actually about. These smaller things drive forward the actual concepts the story is conveying. So you don’t find yourself needing answers to these things because you get engrossed in the impact it has on the current situation instead. This movie handles the bigger concepts awesomely while not sweating the small stuff, and it does a good job of making the viewer do that too.
This movie will leave an impression on whoever watches it. I found myself thinking about it hours after I was done watching it. It has that kind of impact on people, and that shows how powerful it is. This movie shot towards the top of the list of my favorite anime production almost instantly. That is how much I loved this movie. The hype it has received is real, and it’s easy to see why it received that hype. This is a great production of very high quality that will withstand the test of time.
Score: 91/100
Roast or Recommend: Very highly recommend
No comments:
Post a Comment