Looking back at your name

Let’s take a look at your name and does it really deserve all the praise? Spoilers ahead*

One of Makado Shinaki’s most recognizable works and came at a breaking point in the anime industry where millions of people who normally don’t watch anime watched this movie.

While I do think Weathering with You is a better movie, your name has a special place in my heart. 2016 was a weird year. Getting kicked out of an apartment, losing friends, and starting over again in the film industry.

Looking back this movie was really refreshing and I think 2016 was the perfect year to release it in.

I think one word perfectly describes this movie is a feeling. Because that’s what the film leaves us with at the end. Taki and Mitsuha both lost their memories of the adventure they had and only connect after they both felt like they knew each from somewhere.

The main theme of this movie is a feeling. Feeling of lost and being out of place. Feeling of losing something important. Burrowing a few things from Inside out memories and the feelings associated with them are important. It’s the context. While in your name the memories was the price to pay to have Mitsuha be alive in the current timeline, the feelings still linger.

And that is what this film leaves you with. Even after years of not watching it and probably forgetting a lot of the little details and side plots you still have that feeling of when you first watched this film.

Is this the final form of anime? Did it deserve all the attention? No to both. But I still think this is an important film, it really surprised me how much it didn’t surprise me in the plot threads. Watching felt like a clip show of the better parts of his past films and that’s fine heck most directors can’t even do this.

Did Taki and Mitsuha get together in the end, that doesn’t matter but I hope they do.

It’s kind of hard talking about fate in this movie, while a central theme it kind of jumps all over the place with the timeline. Taki and Mitsuha are connected by fate and are fated to at least meet. But the movie also suggests that Mitsuha in a timeline dies and lives. In a Interstellar way love in this movie transcends time and space. So love was the driving factor in Taki searching for the town and trying to find a way to save her so she could be in a new timeline. What if Taki didn’t find anything?

But instead of what ifs Taki did find a way and maybe that’s the way it was suppose to happen in the end. The nihilist in me kind of wanted the ending to be more sad. I think Shinkai might have done his usual ending if things worked out differently.

The ending makes sense in the context of the film, we already got to know both characters. We do know they care for each other. They just have to re-meet each other again.