There was no little joy this week when, against a tide of upsetting news stories, anime master Hayao Miyazaki announced that he was coming out of retirement to make one last film. His welcome re-emergence coincides with evidence that the genre he helped to shape will bloom, regardless. Exhibit A: The Red Turtle, a new, non-Miyazaki Studio Ghibli film, playing at the Queen's Film Theatre's French Film Festival in Belfast; Exhibit B: Makoto Shinkai's Your Name.
Nobody does star-crossed puppy love like Shinkai. Taking a cue from Haruki Murakami's short story On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning, the auteur behind such aching romances as Voices of a Distant Star has fashioned a twisty, amnesiac, body-swap, eco-disaster, aching love story. It hardly needs to be said that you won't see anything else like it this year.
A box-office sensation in Japan, where the film took more than 10 billion yen (€85 million) in its opening month, Your Name puts an appealing sci-fi gloss on a 12th century tale, Torikaebaya Monogatari, wherein a brother is raised as a girl and a sister is raised as a boy.
Thus, when Mitsuha, a perennially mortified high school girl from rural Itomori, wishes to be a handsome Tokyo boy in her next life, she wakes up as Taki, a busy high school boy living in Tokyo. He, in turn, wakes up in Mitsuha’s body.
Unlike most body-swap comedies, the rules are not so apparent. Each teenager realises that they have assumed the other’s corporeal form only when their friends tell them of odd behaviours. They cannot remember their own actions or even names. To ensure that they don’t ruin their respective lives, each one keeps a cell phone diary.
Mitsuha warns Taki to stay away from her breasts when he has them. Poignant and funny observations about cultural gender expectations play out against daydreams and the Japanese pop of Yojiro Noda and the Radwimps.
Meanwhile, a comet is passing over Japan, heralding a constellation of plot twists and allowing Shinkai to explore, in his understated way, the trauma of Japan’s 2011 tsunami and earthquake.
Animation director Masashi Ando, who worked on so many great Studio Ghibli pictures, helped create realistic landscapes and cityscapes, all the better for the writer-director to scope out the thin spaces. Enchanted fans have already started to make pilgrimages to the beautiful locations. Nobody does star-crossed puppy love like Makoto Shinkai.
