What starts out as a cute fantasy romance slowly becomes more dramatic as the characters are gradually given more depth throughout the film. It’s great that Shinkai finally found some widespread recognition for his painstaking and visually-focused filmmaking style. Commercially speaking the film is a smash hit, at least in Asia, and is a shoo-in for an Oscar nomination in America (Best Animated Picture).

It’s obvious that Shinkai tried to transplant his visual storytelling techniques from these films as well as their beautiful visuals into Kimi no Na Wa, and did so fairly successfully. As an artsy douchebag myself, I loved them even if they were depressing and almost humourless films that were unafraid to rip out their audience’s hearts in front of them… In a good way.

The director’s more notable previous films were much shorter and more serious films, which relied on conveying relatively simple but emotional ideas with images and metaphor rather than exposition. I was also particularly impressed by the use of comedy in the film, something that was noticeably absent from Shinkai’s previous offerings (see the end of the review).

Long story short, Kimi no Na Wa is an absolute crowd pleaser and tugs at the heartstrings in all the right places. The film is a Fantasy-Romance which follows the lives of two teenagers in Japan, a boy living in Tokyo and a girl living in a rural area, as they intermittently and accidentally swap bodies over what appears to be a few months due to a mostly unexplained magical phenomenon. Shinkai has long been dubbed “the new (Studio Ghibli’s) Hayao Miyazaki” despite his own protests, and the visuals and stunning cinematography of Kimi no Na Wa certainly live up to that title. Having said that, on with the review!Īs someone who went through a brief but incredibly intense anime phase/obsession a couple of years ago, it was impossible for me to stay away from Makoto Shinkai’s most recent offering given the unrelenting hype surrounding it in the western anime community, and Japan itself. So I am a little overexposed and my contrarian nature won’t let me simply praise Kimi no Na Wa along with everyone else, so I might be nit-picking. Everyone I know over the age of 10 has seen it.

First things first, I live in Japan, and this movie was the most popular film of the year here by far.

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