Your Name (2016)

Originally published in Wildcat Weekly on May 9, 2025

I first watched Your Name on a bootleg anime website. “Don’t click on any banners,” the recommender instructed me. “Play it safe.”

That first viewing felt surreal. Tipped off to the gorgeous music and production design, I was unprepared for the emotionality of a story, particularly one about star-crossed lovers that blends body-swap farce, disaster flick, and coming-of-age dramedy.

Teenagers Taki and Mitsuha each have bizarre dreams about living alternate lives. When they discover those alternate lives to be one another’s—and not random dreams—their lives entwine, but fate refuses to let them connect. When danger looms for one, each endeavors to prevent devastation and maintain the possibility of one day meeting the other.

Much like Haruki Murakami’s novels, Your Name leans into a magic realism that occasionally disorients me. Some scenes have cultural components outside my perspective, leaving me sure I’m missing something significant. But Your Name wields an urgent intensity that overwhelms my questions. When there’s no real threat, the film grips me, squeezing my heart in a vice as these teens learn about each other and themselves, but things ratchet up to eleven in the second act. There’s tense drama when two not-that-distant worlds collide and the clock ticks ever closer to tragedy.

Still, the defining feature of Your Name is its beauty and artistic craft. I’m no anime connoisseur, but I’ve watched enough to confidently declare that few look and sound like this. Night skies swell with mesmerizing color, while lake water beckons cool and nourishing; the lens flare here’s so vivid you’ll wonder whether it’s actually filmed. Every shot, whether pastoral or urban, is a masterpiece, the music keeps pace with the images, and the score by RADWIMPS incites emotion with every piano keystroke. I use several instrumental pieces from Your Name in my “If You Really Knew Me” playlist for Diamond Day—they’re that soothing, that powerful.

That all of this beautiful art would support a Quantum Leap romance between teenage protagonists would seem to be a misappropriation of resources. How many times have we watched young lovers pining? It’s a trope as old as time! But Your Name is greater than the sum of its parts because it treats the Taki-Mitsuha relationship with cosmic sincerity; yes, there’s a silly body-swap premise, but the filmmakers portray it as a grand, metaphysical tether across time and space, in a way that should be laughably ridiculous but instead pulls me onto its wavelength. Your Name presents its relationships as they feel to the young people within them: epic, all-encompassing, and life-affirming. It’s refreshing.

While you can surely find it online, the streaming service Crunchyroll has Your Name available right now. I technically own the Blu-ray, but considering I loaned it out in 2018 and haven’t seen it since, you’re on your own finding this one.

Rest assured, Your Name is worth some searching.