Makoto Shinkai
Your Name.

Introductory Note: The author of this article has already written a complete, structured, and well-argued review/guide to this film, which can be found at this link. Consequently, the following is to be understood more as an afterthought on the meaning of the film than as a true review.

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On the upcoming January 23, 24, and 25, thanks to the commendable joint activity of distributors Dynit and Nexo Digital, the Japanese animated film Your Name., also known by its original title Kimi no na wa. and with the international title chosen by the director your name. (with the period at the end and all lowercase: for the Japanese, the spelling is not a whim) will be released in cinemas throughout Italy. This marks the first of a series of releases that will accompany anime fans throughout 2017 and earns Dynit all the respect of Italian otaku, a social category increasingly confused and indefinable: if until the '90s otaku were still that precise and small niche composed of those who were aware that Tom & Jerry and Sailor Moon had different nationalities, target audiences, and narrative purposes (all factors regularly ignored by the general public and even by television programmers), from the 21st century onward, it's hard to find someone who doesn't openly boast of being a fan of UFO Robot Goldrake, a connoisseur of Yoshiyuki Tomino, and an exegete of Puella Magi Madoka Magica. Yet, in Japan, the otaku phenomenon, according to the king of otaku Hideaki Anno, has almost reduced to a subculture. In a recent interview for the tenth anniversary of Studio Khara, the director defined the coordinates of current animation products, which he believes can be divided into three categories, plus one: products for children, entertainment products for the general audience, and products for maniakku, a new fandom that reveres works where the sterile purely technical or purely erotic aspects are the core and meaning of the works themselves; Anno places otaku culture between the two categories "entertainment" and "maniakku", which are those rare works today that, despite having great popular ambitions and resorting to service, still have as a primary goal to communicate a strong message to the viewer. Works that have meaning.

The film Your Name. fits into this debate, much debated in Japan, about the direction local animation is taking. The director is Makoto Shinkai, a figure who started as a bizarre outsider and has over the years become a reference point for Japanese animation, to the point where all media, both local and from the rest of the world including Italian ones, have compared him to Hayao Miyazaki. The parallelism, conceived purely for journalistic purposes to sell more copies or count more clicks (do not think that Japanese newspapers are better than Italian ones) is alarmingly superficial, to the point that even Shinkai himself had to defend himself from this "accusation" of being the heir of the director of Spirited Away. The reason is simple: there is nothing of Miyazaki in Shinkai, or rather there is everything regarding the aspect and nothing concerning the content.

Hayao Miyazaki has long, for decades, expressed his admiration for Hideaki Anno (and recently more confirmations have arrived): the two share everything regarding content and nothing about appearance. Just think of the extremely varied and interesting reinterpretations in the works of Miyazaki and Anno of their recurring themes: technology as a bearer of both benefits and harm, which then becomes the theme of environmentalism, which then becomes the theme of the relationship between man and nature, which then becomes the theme of woman as the center of life, and so on in a deeper discourse that the two filmmakers have been able to interpret in an otaku manner, that is, in works that are both fascinating and rich in service but based on a strong concept that overshadows every other aspect. This semantic richness is not found in Shinkai. Your Name. is a beautiful film, a joy for the eyes and ears, an evident indication of the great technical possibilities of the current Japanese animation industry, a moving experience, a textbook romantic comedy, and a successful title that, however, has nothing to say to the viewer that hasn't been said before.

Powerful themes like the necessity of harmony with nature in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind or the necessity of self-confidence in Neon Genesis Evangelion are not even touched upon in Your Name., which focuses on the recovery of a large number of Japanese cultural stereotypes (both high and low) and mixes them in a blend as convincing as it is retrograde. Your Name. is a wonderful puzzle made up of hundreds of already seen, already invented, already thought pieces: Shinkai has the gift of knowing how to put them together in an organic unity, framing them with his usual dazzling graphic ability and immersing them in a soundtrack composed in close collaboration with the rock band RADWIMPS. The result is a film that wants to make you laugh and wants to make you cry with a stopwatch in hand, conscious that the elements it uses are all more than tested.

Obviously, there's nothing wrong with making a comedy where the weak damsel in distress needs to be saved by the strong prince charming of the moment, which celebrates the standard patriarchal Japanese lifestyle that envisions him as the breadwinner and her as the housewife, which promotes religious superstition, which divides the world into social castes, but one wonders if all this still makes sense in the 21st century, especially if these retrograde elements are immersed in such dazzling graphic imagery that renders them subtly subliminal and not immediately identifiable. What have Miyazaki's heroines meant if women still vitally need their man to survive? What was the point of Anno's Operation Yashima if the world is then saved by the individual superhero of the moment and not by the collective's awareness?

The real problem with Your Name. is that it's too beautiful a film. The splendid animation, the moving scenography, the dazzling play of natural and artificial light, the screenplay so precise, the balanced plot, the wonderful music harmoniously integrated with the images, the use of banal real locations that, magnified by the film, have become tourist sites… everything works just too well. Your Name. is a cinematic spectacle of rare beauty, it will be a benchmark, and it strongly deserves to be seen in cinemas and appreciated on the big screen. But beyond the white surface on which lights and shadows are projected, what remains?