Taki improves Mitsuha’s basketball game Mitsuha helps the clueless Taki score a date with a co-worker from his after-school job. The first half is like a twenty-first-century take on “Freaky Friday.” Mitsuha and Taki swap bodies many times over the course of the movie, leaving reports for one another as text messages on their iPhones. It helps that “Your Name” is fun to watch. Tokyo’s streets surge with life, down to the anti-slip striations on the pavement the countryside erupts with a lushness worthy of “ Planet Earth.” Even mundane images-the tangle of recharging cables atop a high-school student’s desk old cans cluttering a countryside bus stop a wood-and-paper shoji screen sliding in its well-worn track-glow with a rich, romantic intensity. The backdrops are digitally rendered in detail so exquisite that they resemble high-definition video. Although it was produced entirely on computers, like nearly all modern anime, Shinkai and his team seem to have synthesized the best parts of both worlds: the characters emote with a warmth reminiscent of traditional hand-drawn animation. It contains some of the most vivid imagery ever seen in an animated film. The success of “Your Name” is due, in part, to its remarkable beauty. “I don’t think any more people should see it.” The film has now grossed more than three hundred and twenty-six million dollars worldwide, making it the most successful anime film of all time-surpassing even Hayao Miyazaki’s “Spirited Away,” from 2001. Even its director, Makoto Shinkai, seems to have been taken aback: “It’s not healthy,” he said, during a December interview in Paris. It has become a national and regional phenomenon. But since “Your Name” premièred, last August, young adults in Japan, South Korea, Thailand, and China have flocked to watch and rewatch it. Such a film seems like an unlikely candidate for “Titanic”-level success. Soon afterward, Mitsuha begins switching bodies with Taki, a teen-age boy at a Tokyo high school. After the rite is over, she rushes down the shrine’s ancient staircase to the empty street below and cries out, in frustration, “Make me a handsome Tokyo boy in my next life!” As fate would have it, her wish is granted. To Mitsuha, though, it’s an inescapable cage of tradition. Mitsuha’s rural village is perched on the edge of a gleaming lake, surrounded by verdant forests and soaring mountains. Dressed in the red and white costume of a miko shrine maiden, she and a partner pose and twirl, punctuating the leisurely rhythms of drums with precisely timed, jangly handbells.
Early in “Your Name,” the anime blockbuster that’s conquered Japan, China, and the rest of Asia, a high-school girl named Mitsuha performs a ritual dance at her family’s Shinto shrine.
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