Your Name.

Makoto Shinkai’s 106 minute animation opens with Mitsuha in a mountain town and Taki in Tokyo waking, at irregular intervals, in each other’s bodies. The film changes genre at the midpoint. The first forty five minutes work as body swap comedy; the second half becomes a countdown disaster thriller and drops the jokes almost entirely. For a viewer who dislikes the break it can feel like two films sold as one. The origin of the idea explains the second half. Shinkai visited the ruined fishing village of Yuriage in July 2011, after the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, and said his thought there was that this could have been his town. Because the disaster is modelled on a real aftermath, the wish that drives the ending sits differently from a standard happy resolution. Yojiro Noda of Radwimps wrote the music, and Shinkai asked for songs that would stand in for dialogue. The practical result: a large share of the plot arrives inside long song montages. Against a total budget of around 750 million yen, the Japanese gross passed 25 billion yen, near a tenth of the country’s box office that year. Shinkai himself called the film incomplete and unbalanced. Not for you if plot delivered inside pop song montages irritates you: several load bearing scenes arrive that way.