Hype can be a devastating factor regarding cinematic viewing.
A film either meets its buildup (a rarity to happen), surpasses its buildup (a once in a blue moon event), or delivers an underwhelming performance that may have not been as disappointing had such hype been nonexistent. There’s a lot of hype for Your Name: number one in the Japanese box office, highest grossing anime film worldwide, reviewers describing it as the next Spirited Away! I would have tried not letting such high expectations affect my judgement going in, had I not been seeing the film (or heard about it) for such reasoning. Now, to be fair, unlike American blockbusters, when a foreign film gets recognition inside the States (particularly an anime), it’s usually a good sign the film will meet its hype. Yet the question remains: does it?
Your Name is a good film. An enjoyable, humorous, beautifully animated, touching feature…it’s most certainly no Spirited Away, however, or any high-quality Hayao Miyazaki story (aka 90% of them) for that matter—though I don’t think it’s very fair comparing Your Name to such works of art. The film’s plot about two people (a teenage boy and girl) switching bodies has been done many times before, and while the “twist” thrown in the middle definitely shakes things up, the film primarily sticks to the standard body swap tropes—though seemingly to an intentionally comedic level. For example, the first thing Your Name focuses on with the switch is the teen boy feeling up his new female body—a noticeably overused body swap trope (though for, admittedly, totally grounded reasons). Yet the film has another scene where the boy does it again, and again, and again, and again, and again to the point where it actually becomes funny—as if the writers are saying; “we know this trope’s been done a thousand times before, but we’re going to continue doing it a thousand more times until you start laughing at the sheer repetitive ridiculousness!”
The romance is your fairly standard Japanese anime romance: sweet and touching, but nothing innovative or profound. The film focuses excessively on plot points it could have breezed through (resulting in a poorly paced finale that drags on for too long), and breezes through plot points I would have enjoyed seeing focused on. Yet Your Name’s biggest flaw, is my own fault: I expected far too much from it. You’ll often end up doing that when comparing a film to a Miyazaki work, but can I really be blamed when dozens of others compared Your Name to his works as well? To reiterate: Your Name=good film. Nothing amazing, nothing groundbreaking, nothing bad, nothing awful, nothing subpar—just an entertaining animated feature, with lovely animation, a fun premise, an intriguing twist, some lighthearted humor, and a touching bond between two characters.
