CAPSULE: Your Name (2016, Dir. Makoto Shinkai)

For those mourning the ever-threatened loss of Hayao Miyazaki from the Japanese animation landscape, the arrival of Makoto Shinkai and his beautifully crafted, beautifully drawn, beautifully evocative new feature Your Name (Kimi no Na wa) should allay fears that the world is going to lose the distinct pleasure of hand drawn animation. And while Shinkai may take a little longer to exude the inherent humanism of Ghibli's artworks, this blockbuster baseline presents a very encouraging starting point.

In fact, where Your Name's duo of main characters (Mitsuha, the daughter of a rural councilman, and Taki, a Tōkyō schoolboy) may want for a little depth, the film's genre bending narrative intricacies provide such richness that the emerging love story (one which spans distance, time, gender, spirituality and death itself) provides a wholly satisfying experience.

Much of the joy of experiencing Your Name is its attention to detail. Despite its inherent fantasy, the animators at CoMix Wave Films have crafted a beautifully observed representation of modern life in Japan. Mitsuha's craving for the big lights of Tōkyō pays of in in the film’s exceptionally rendered realism, which is enough to have audiences agape like the first time they exited Shibuya station and saw the city's high-rise star fields. Similarly, the catastrophic beauty of her lakeside home, with all its traditional vistas, is animated with awe-inspiring perfection.

Props have to be handed out to Shinkai for so adeptly blending such disparate genres into a fully cohesive whole. Your Name's spritely transitions from body swap comedy to time travel mystery to disaster movie and back again are adventurous and, bar a slight hiccough in its third act, barely register as transitions at all. There’s a beautiful emotional through-line to the film and with the eye-welling artwork from start to finish, Shinkai’s film manages tugs at the heartstrings with supple sophistication.

★★★☆

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