Your Name (2016)
A beautiful anime for romantics that already love anime.
Presentation:
Makoto Shinkai presents a beautiful anime of two star crossed lovers across time. The film deals with themes of fate and love as is directed and younger audiences and people that are already in love with anime. It begins with a typical music video opening that make you immediate recognize a familiar cinematic language for the animes that came before it. I don’t think this anime will be as universally appealing especially with its story. It’s not particularly a mature story and overly dramatic, but the mechanism behind the body swap is confusing and inconsistent. But visually the film is wonderful differentiating from Studio Ghibli by being more photorealistic with artificial depth of field, parallax camera movement and lens flares emulating real cameras while retaining some painterly rendering.
Conclusion:
This is one of Makoto Shinkai’s most well known pieces, but I think his other short form works with realism are better. It’s not for me as it’s pretty formulaic, but I can definitely see it being very moving for those that love the idea of romance transcending fate, particularly young women familiar with the Shojo genre.
Recommendations
Pixar films do have soul after all.