Finally caught up on the highest grossing Japanese anime film (in Japan) from 2016 – Your Name. See. This. Movie. It’s a marvelous, beautiful, sweet, funny, tragic, gorgeous, romantic, and all around excellent film. Inside Out won best animated film of 2016 and that’s a really good movie… but it’s no Your Name.
The movie came out on iTunes this week and is also available on BlueRay via Amazon. I saw the dubbed version though I hear both the sub and dub are good.
The film starts out as a body swap teen comedy… a high school boy in Tokyo wakes up in the body of a girl who lives in a small town and she occasionally wakes up in his. They remember their body swaps as dreams but everyone else in their lives note their weird behavior. There’s typical (but tasteful) anime grabbing of boobs and realizing there’s something DOWN THERE and it’s cute and funny.
But that opening sequence and the general hook of the movie is just a Trojan horse for the actual plot. A plot that is a sad, beautiful, tragic, emotionally powerful series of events that I can’t spoil and you shouldn’t spoil for yourself. I will say that I found the actual plot – which does borrow from and extend the body swap story – to be both beatuiful and tragic at the same time. I haven’t been as emotionally invested in a film in a very long time. If you’re the kind of person who likes sci-fi twists on romantic and dramatic storylines, you’ll love this film.
The movie always remains a sweet, desperate, powerful romance between the boy and the girl. I was drawn into their story and their plight and found myself shouting at the screen and (yes, I’ll admit it) tearing up (in both sadness and joy). I wanted such great things for them and wished the movie could quit messing around and just give me the happy ending I needed. I loved this movie.
I was fooled by the opening sequence in the film and thought it would be a cute two hours of anime, in and out. I knew the film had gotten great reviews but I wasn’t seeing it beyond the low-key Freaky Friday as Romance storyline. But the movie tricked me and that was wonderful. It’s such a good film, regardless of genre and regardless of art style.
Score: 91