Your Name is strangely brilliant. What makes it brilliant is the trippy plot. Everyone knows it's a body-swapping movie, but it surprisingly becomes much more than that. It throws in a welcome twist that I did not see coming. It becomes more than just Freaky Friday, but a time-travel disaster movie. It is also brilliant because of its beautiful animation. It is cinematic. I know it's all drawn, but the "camera" pans, it zooms, it moves. How incredible is that? The animators take painstaking care to create a real world. There are real locations that I recognized, like the pedestrian bridge outside the Toshin building in Shinjuku. Firstly, I was shocked that I recognized it. But secondly, I was shocked that it merited being in the movie.
It's kind of cheesy in the way that anime is (like the title?). I think Western audiences are just not very used to it but what is mainstream in anime comes off as cheesy--the shrieking voices, the dramatic poetic narration. But what stands out the most are the musical interludes. It's very strange, sort of recapping and interpreting the movie for us. We have become accustomed to Studio Ghibli's anime, but the animation style is actually totally different. But I think Your Name is a good introduction for Western audiences to a more traditional style of anime. Makoto Shinkai is supposedly the "new Hayao Miyazaki." What is yet to be seen is if he'll have the same crossover appeal.
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