Makoto Shinkai

Your Name. (2016) - 4/5

A body-swapping movie? With a romantic main plot? And it’s good? How did that happen? Well the animation is stunningly beautiful, for one thing, and the plot takes some interesting twists right off the bat. It’s unusal that story structure will be a big selling point unless the movie’s playing backwards like in Memento. But here the story structure is used to keep the audience in the dark about some details of the mechanics of what’s going on, so we can discover it along with the characters in the movie. It’s close to a 5/5, but it overplays the ‘new body parts’ gag and the final conflict sequence was too contrived for how long it lasted. Still, great music, gorgeous use of color, and an english dub that has a surprising amount of work put into it. If you like animated movies at all, this is a definite must-see.