Makoto Shinkai's most commercially successful and most critically acclaimed anime is an engaging variation on the body-switch trope usually used for comedy or satire. Here it's the basis for a romantic fantasy about growing up, with its attendant problems of love and loss. A boy in Tokyo wakes up one morning to find that he's inhabiting the body of a girl in a village, and she wakes up with his consciousness inside her body. The usual comic mishaps occur as each goes through the other's daily routine. They wake up the next day with no memory of the switch, but the reactions of their family and friends make them realize that something strange happened. When it happens again and again, they begin to figure out what's going on and to keep a record of it. Eventually each discovers the other's identity and tries to communicate with them, but then the switches suddenly stop. It falls to the boy to recognize that the cessation of the switches has something to do with a disaster that struck the girl's village three years earlier. His determination to get to the source of the mystery forms the main plot of the film. Your Name is overloaded with perhaps more cosmic and mystical stuff than some viewers can tolerate, and it sidesteps some real issues about gender identity, but the astonishing visuals, cliff-hanging action and suspense, and heartfelt emotion help keep the film from bogging down into sheer hooey.
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